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EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 



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EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

ESSAYS ON THE WAR AND 
THE FUTURE 



BY 
HENRY SEIDEL CANBY, Ph.D. 

PROFESSOR IN YALE UNIVERSITY 



Neto ¥ortt 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1919 

All right* reserved 



^ 






COPYRIGHT, 1918, 

By The Century Company, by the Tale Publishing Association, Inc., 
by Harper and Brothers, and by the Atlantic Monthly Company. 

Copyright, 1919, 

By Harper and Brothers, by The Century Company, 
and by the Yale Publishing Association, Inc. 

Copyright, 1919, 
Bt THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1919. 



NortoootJ Tfcxtit 

J. 8. Cushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



APR -2 1919 
©CLA515107 



<J>. 



WALTER HINES PAGE 

LATE AMBASSADOR TO GREAT BRITAIN 

WHOSE DEVOTION TO THE CAUSE 

OF MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING 

AMONG THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES 

WAS A CONSTANT HELP AND INSPIRATION TO 

THE AUTHOR OF THIS BOOK 



INTRODUCTION 

In the fat, green days before 1914, a book was 
made in a manner that had become almost con- 
ventional. You lived, you studied, you thought, 
and then retired, like an expectant mother, to some 
mental solitude, where the travail in due and decor- 
ous order was ended, and the book came forth 
complete. But in this book, conceived in war time 
and finished in the early days of peace, I have 
been subject to a different ordering. Life burned 
intensely in 1918. The battle-front, the tumult- 
uous humanity behind the lines, Great Britain and 
France at war, where I was a humble observer, 
flung imperious summons. Ideas, hopefully in- 
terpretative of the surging forces loose everywhere, 
shot into the mind, sometimes in a trench, some- 
times in a munitions factory, on a steamer deck, 
or at midnight in Piccadilly, and would wait only 
for the quiet of an Oxford garden, or the peace of 
a room high hung in Kensington above a park 
cheery with thrushes, to be worked out as far as 
the uncertainties of the time would permit. 

As I wrote, then and later, I felt there was only 
vii 



viii INTRODUCTION 

one question : What will come afterward ? — and 
that reflections upon race and education and work- 
ing women and fighting men were all, like the game 
of Twenty Questions, aimed at one answer. The 
next generation may find that answer. I see only 
a little further now that the war is over, than in 
April of 1918, when Hardy's President of the Im- 
mortals seemed about to play his own game with 
our ideals and our little strengths behind them. 
The ideas begin to fall together ; one sees the con- 
necting links and I have written in many of them 
in brief transitional and prefatory sections ; but 
these essays are still most valuable, if valuable at 
all, as historical evidence of how the war and its 
aftermath affected one American mind. And 
hence I have left them much as they were first con- 
ceived : some with the memory of last night's bomb- 
ing behind the words, or the intense sense of racial 
contrast felt by an alien who finds himself among 
comrades and friends ; others written in the dawn 
of peace and looking forward to a future full of 
urgency and promise and doubt. And though 
only one bears that title all — the first four on in- 
ternational relationships, the fifth on morale, the 
sixth and seventh on education, the eighth on re- 
construction, and the ninth on war's ending — all, 
and the brief prefatory essays that precede them, 
present the fruits of education by violence. 



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

I wish to acknowledge the kindness of the 
editors of Harper's Magazine for permission to 
reprint " Transport 106," Education by Violence, 
and Spes Unica ; The Century Magazine for 
Blood and Water, Innocents Abroad, and When 
Johnny Comes Marching Home; The Atlantic 
Monthly for The Irish Mind; and The Yale 
Review for Tanks and War's Ending. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



Introduction vii 

Acknowledgments ix 

I On Writing the Truth .... 1 

"Transport 106" 6 

II On the English 29 

Blood and Water 32 

III On Irish Literature .... 55 
The Irish Mind 57 

IV On the Sense of Race .... 83 
Innocents Abroad 86 

V On Morale 104 

Spes Unica 107 

VI On the Uncommon Man . . . .128 

Tanks 130 

VII On the Personal in Education . . 152 
Education by Violence . . . .155 

VIII On the Next War 179 

When Johnny Comes Marching Home . 182 

IX On Salvage and Waste .... 208 

War's Ending 211 

xi 



EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 



ON WRITING THE TRUTH 

In the last great crisis of the war, in the time 
of the rush over the Chemin des Dames, and of 
Chateau Thierry and Compiegne, I was a visitor 
on the British Front at the chateau of Rollen- 
court, where the accredited correspondents were 

— I can think of no more fitting word than 

interned. All day we were off in motors, buzzing 
the long white roads back of the front, chatting 
in dug-outs, adventuring in quiet trenches, lunch- 
ing with courteous generals in sound of sleepy 
guns, breasting column after column of marching 
men — blue poilus weary for their rest camp, 
fresh Americans, like brown helmeted legionaries, 
striding loose-limbed toward the front, careless 
Australians, ... And at tea time we would swing 
back into the shaded avenue, where Tommies in 

shorts " were running races on the turf, and 
down past the turreted columbiere to the sweeping 
facade of the seventeenth century chateau. 

In a salon, by a table covered with maps and 
pipes, under pictures of the haute noblesse of the 
province, we had tea, while the correspondents 



2 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

swapped their " facts " and withheld their "sto- 
ries," smoked each his cigarette, and retired, 
thoughtful, to grind out his column for the world's 
reading. At seven their work was ready for the 
censor; at eight we dined, a criss-cross of banter 
and argument ; at ten came the communique, relax- 
ing the tension (for things were going badly in 
Champagne) ; and then to bed in a high ceilinged 
chamber, stuccoed in Louis Seize. 

Midnight, and a Boche plane whirred over (we 
heard his bombs on poor St. Pol) ; then dreamless 
sleep, and a May morning, mists and dew in that 
gentle valley, he of the " Mail " reading Horace 
as he walked in the aisles of the lush garden, he of 
the " Times " walking with me by the shadowy 
river, trying to forget the war. And at ten, out 
from that valley of peace, to the noisy roads, the 
dust, the guns, the " crump " of the shells, the 
plodding, horrible, fascinating machine of war. 

A curious life. The soldier has little time to 
think. He is too weary, too frightened, too busy, 
or too dull. TWe civilian cannot think of war as 
war. It is too unreal for him. But these men 
whose names have come to our breakfast tables 
with the coffee cups, were neither innocents, 
naively pushing toward victory, nor civilians 
dreaming afar off. Daily they saw war, and 
nightly they came back to their garden. 

And truth of thought for them became a differ- 
ent thing from truth of writing. No war has 
been so honestly, so faithfully reported as this one. 
The correspondent has put into words all but his 
thinking. Not all, of course, for the censor ac- 



ON WRITING THE TRUTH 3 

tually or potentially deprived us daily of many 
sensations in opinion and experience. But that 
which ever remained unwritten, which had to re- 
main unwritten, was the meditation of these high- 
bred, thoughtful men, trained to observe with 
minds that the broadest culture as well as expe- 
rience in the field had made keenly observant. 

And on what did they meditate? Not, as they 
wished, upon literature and music and free inter- 
course with men living free of war's restrictions 
(they welcomed the visitor just because he was an 
outsider) ; but, so it seemed to me, constantly and 
broodingly upon the mystery of war. Their 
minds reacted from opinions on strategy, praise of 
bravery, word pictures forming and reforming of 
pitiful fugitives streaming southward, broken 
towns, and airplanes shining among shrapnel puffs. 
They talked of the art of Henry James, but 
brooded, or so I thought, upon the causes of all 
this turmoil, the effect of this stirring up of all the 
passions upon the future. In my quiet talks with 
them when the days' sights were seen and recorded 
for the millions at home, I heard much that did not 
go into their articles ; and it was most of it specu- 
lation upon the significance of war. 

Privileged observers, safe themselves except for 
chance shots or bombing, with time for thinking, 
they could watch the war as the scientist in his 
laboratory watches through his lens the conflict of 
microcosms in a drop of water. And they felt 
with intensity what we visitors and many soldiers 
dimly felt, that the whole truth had not been said, 
could not yet be said about the war. The lesser 



4 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

truth, that the Germans had willed the war, that 
they must be beaten, was for the time more impor- 
tant. More light, in 1918, would have made us see 
less clearly. The greater truth, the causes lying 
behind all wars, including this one, the good effects 
of war which should be gained otherwise, the bad 
effects of war, which should be defined, and known, 
and hated — all this they stored in their hearts. 
For this truth they seemed to be constantly grop- 
ing, though often in an hour's talk only a hint, a 
phrase, an ejaculation revealed the undercurrent 
of painful inquiry beneath the immediate business 
of the day. 

Men like these, and the soldiers fortunate enough 
to have kept their intellects free and clear in the 
grind of the trenches, will begin to write this truth 
now. Neither we who saw the war by glimpses, nor 
those prophetic critics who wrote of modern war 
before it became a universal experience, can give 
the evidence which must be presented. The time 
begins to be ripe for true writing. The crisis of 
war is over; the crisis of readjustment is upon us; 
the penalty for plunging blindly upon new curves 
leading inevitably to new conflicts, lies measurably 
ahead. Free speech is safe now, or rather, noth- 
ing else is safe for us. We have had narrative, 
description, poetry, and philosophy of the war; 
we have not had that inner burning thought forced 
upon reflective minds by danger and horror and 
waste and splendid bravery. The war is over. Let 
us open our minds and allow no left-over scruples 
of anxious patriotism to suppress the best of all 
patriotism, which is the truth born of devotion to 



ON WRITING THE TRUTH 5 

one's fellow man. The truth about the war, when 
it is written, will please neither pacifist nor milita- 
rist ; neither preacher nor business man ; but it may 
help to set them free from errors long deluding. 
The germs of war, like the germs of all diseases, 
we carry about us. There is no cure for a serious 
infection ; but there is an antiseptic, the truth 
freely spoken. The real literature of the war, 
when it comes, will speak to an open mind, and such 
a mind I ask for the more modest endeavor of these 
essays. 



"TRANSPORT 106" 

This, of course, was not her real number, nor 
can I tell her name, which is of little importance 
in comparison with her true designation, the May- 
flower sailing eastward, with four thousand Amer- 
icans outward bound, and many a homegoing 
Ally. It was a strange voyage, as different from 
anything conceivable in peace-time as impressive 
dreams from trivial realities. Day after day our 
striped and spotted convoy herded through plung- 
ing seas. Behind us a gray transport, like a beau- 
tiful dolphin, dipped to rise as if for a jump, 
shook her bow free, surged forward until we could 
see the pink of massed faces on her hoisting-deck, 
then dropped again astern. Ahead, a converted 
liner swung backward and forward like an anxious 
mother; and clear to the sea-rim great zebra- 
monsters followed us, tankers laboring hull under, 
horse-boats, transports, a grim cruiser shepherd- 
ing their flanks, winking angrily at laggards, 
guiding and hurrying our rear. 

Day after day, somewhere in the ocean, we 
plodded eastward, until, one morning, we saw 

6 



"TRANSPORT 106" 7 

through the haze a row of tiny destroyers sitting 
on their haunches like a pack of hounds in wait 
for us. The midmost nosed our mother ship and 
swung astern of her, swaying drunkenly like a toy 
tin ship in a tub ; the rest spread fan-wise through 
the ocean. Dusk comes and greener water. Sig- 
nals blink, and the big, gray boats behind us quiver 
and turn inward, setting their prows down gin- 
gerly into the dangerous waves. Within, the 
corridors of the great ship are lit with dim purple 
lights. High, gloomy curtains sway with the roll 
before every door. It is a scene from the palace 
of Manfred. Soldiers guard the stairways, and 
voices are suddenly hushed as from the merriment 
inside some one steps into the gloom, hears the 
swish of the waves, thinks of the great ships beside 
him stealing through the darkness, shudders a 
little, and goes back. But in the lounge there is 
a blaze of light, card-playing, singing, French les- 
sons, war-talk, a nervous grip on a life-preserver 
now and then, yet, in spite of tension, the atmos- 
phere of a friendly club. In the morning boat- 
drill with life-preservers, the officers like yellow 
chicks with pieces of shell clinging, the little cock- 
ney in his flapped overcoat like a belted caterpil- 
lar. The company's champions box in the cock-pit 
aft. Through a hedge of gaitered legs one 
catches sight of stout calves twisting, jerking, and 



8 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

now and then a supple waist. They jump up 
against a blue horizon, clinch, swing, clinch, and 
down out of sight again. From every watch- 
point the lookouts scan the gray-green Irish 
water. " Wreckage, red, ninety degrees," they 
call, and we see kegs, planks, boxes, in sad trails 
bleeding upward from a gaping wound in some 
good ship, pirate-sunk beneath us. 

This is the setting merely of Transport 106, 
but it is important because its subdued inten- 
sity was like a screen of quivering light against 
which men's characters were vividly flung. Indeed 
I write of her not to describe our strange reversion 
to the perils of the first emigrations, but because 
she staged the prologue of a drama of interna- 
tional character whose action will continue 
through our times. A man wise enough might 
have used our ship's company as a laboratory for 
infinite tests and discoveries. We had Americans 
of every useful class aboard — officers and enlisted 
men, government officials, diplomats, members of 
special missions, Y. M. C. A. and Red Cross work- 
ers, business men ; and most of the officers and all 
of the three-thousand-odd soldiers below were cam- 
ouflaged civilians drawn from every business pro- 
fession and trade. We had a British Cabinet 
Minister, an M. P., a dozen majors and captains, 
a score of business representatives. We had 



"TRANSPORT 106" 9 

Scotch, Irish, Parisians, French-Canadians, Aus- 
tralians, Italians. We had a leavening of woman- 
kind, wives and stenographers. It was the Ark, 
which also was representative of all save the enemy 
alien. But it took months in the curiously changed 
atmosphere of England and France, with Ameri- 
cans curiously changed also, before I could inter- 
pret the life aboard her. 

A remark of Bernard Shaw's crystallized the 
problem. I doubt whether the prayer I saw em- 
broidered upon a sampler in Mr. Shaw's living- 
room in Adelphi was ever answered, if proffered: 

Let me be kind to all, I pray, 
And never faults of others say. 

But though Mr. Shaw has left the rough work 
of contemporary satire to Mr. H. G. Wells, who 
has made it a sub-department of his manufactory 
of new worlds, nevertheless of all men in our time 
he is best able to make those incisive phrases that 
grip and hang upon the mind until it turns and 
fights it out with the ideas coursing behind them. 
" The possibility of anything like international 
federation," he said, swinging backward and for- 
ward in his chair with the peculiar nervous dignity 
characteristic of the man, " depends upon the ex- 
istence of psychological homogeneity among con- 
tracting nations. If the idealists do not get hold 



10 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

of the scheme and try to swallow it at one bite, it 
will work out." 

Month by month, as I saw in England, in Ire- 
land, in France, and at the front the infinite im- 
portance of racial personality — how it wrecked 
armies, won victories, frustrated diplomacy, and 
in every crisis was a great X whose equivalent we 
were seldom permitted to know, Mr. Shaw's phrase 
sank farther into my mind. Are the nations, in this 
respect, psychologically homogeneous? Do they 
need to be? What is the psychological homoge- 
neity necessary for the joint action in the future 
which we all crave? These questions are ever re- 
turning. And my thinking, whether it begins in 
a trench in Lorraine, or a Sinn Fein meeting, or an 
English week-end conversation with some person- 
age " uncorked " by the intensity of the times, 
always carries back to Transport 106. 

There were, as I have said, representatives of all 
the potential high contracting Powers not enemy 
aboard, and if Americans were in heavy majority, 
that was in just proportion to our perhaps dom- 
inating influence upon the new world-order to fol- 
low this war. It was an instructive experience to 
live in pleasure and in danger for sixteen days with 
this advance-guard of re-migrating America. At 
home we had become a little skeptical, before the 
war, as to the racial individuality of the American. 



"TRANSPORT 106" 11 

When your butcher is German, your plumber Irish, 
your shoe-shiner Greek, your fruiterer Italian, 
your best friend the son of a Scandinavian, the 
sense of race weakens. I am an American, you 
say, but what are these others ? One of the great 
experiences of Europe in war-time was to find the 
American, even the hyphenated American, running 
true to a type that the foreigner recognized as 
valid. In uniform or out of it, even if he never 
opens his mouth, there is never a question in Eu- 
rope to-day as to whether a man is American. 

Every attempt to define a race as a whole (the 
French as frivolous, for example) breaks down; 
nevertheless, I believe that most observers of the 
year 1918 in Europe would agree with the charac- 
terization I made of our Americans on Transport 
106. Roughly speaking, they were divided into 
Americans serious-minded and Americans earnest- 
minded, with a few sophisticated individuals too de- 
tached to classify. I understood very well the re- 
mark months later of a well-known woman in Lon- 
don, herself a transplanted American : " You seem 
to me now," she said, " a grim people. I have to 
put a ' Jock ' or a ' Tommy ' into every American 
ward of my hospital to make our boys laugh. 
Americans take life so seriously ! " That, in spite 
of joke-cracking and teasing, was the impression 
we made on shipboard, and in France and England 



12 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

also. I have seen a good-natured mob of sailors 
and doughboys fling slang at one another under 
the nose of the King at a Fourth of July ball-game 
in London; and I have heard a squad of fresh 
" rough-necks " from the plains " jolly " a High- 
land officer for his too-pink knees ; but neverthe- 
less, whenever I think of the American overseas I 
seem to see a tall, lean, capable fellow with a pre- 
ternaturally solemn face, and earnest eyes only now 
and then lightening. " How solemn they look," 
passed from mouth to mouth of the crowd in Man- 
chester as three thousand of ours marched by. 
" They must be real fighters." 

I could have explained, for I had lived with such 
solemn youths, all the way over. It was not 
merely the effect of a new world and the approach 
to the war, although these had their part. There 
was something deeper, and politicians at home and 
abroad would do well to take note of it. Persh- 
ing's Army has been well named a crusade. 
Whether it is climate, or heredity, or an inexpli- 
cable race development, there is a curious nervous 
intensity in the American when he is roused that 
is quite different from anything they know in Eu- 
rope. Scarcely a " Tommy " or a poilu but knew 
twice as thoroughly what the war meant in loss 
and endeavor as the most imaginative American, 
and yet they did not take it so hard. The war 



"TRANSPORT 106" 13 

with them had become like a cold in the head ; they 
felt it always and so never got excited over it. 
Nevertheless, good foreign observers say they 
never were so " grim," even in 1914, as these Amer- 
icans. 

There are two kinds of American grimness, as I 
learned very quickly on our transport. The first, 
which I have called serious-mindedness, springs 
from the moral nature, is rarer than mere earnest- 
mindedness, more intelligent, and in the long run 
perhaps more effective. I know nothing equal to 
its intensity except the fanatic idealism of certain 
Irish leaders and the bulldog tenacity of the pure- 
bred southern Englishman. It is a genuine sur- 
vival of the hard-fighting Puritanism that the sev- 
enteenth century hammered to stay into the Amer- 
ican temperament. 

Sometimes it appears as a determined protest- 
antism, as with the grizzled, square-set Westerner 
who spent long days scowling across the unfamiliar 
wastes of ocean. " I sure love a fight," he said, 
" and I expect to enjoy myself over there. But I 
hate war. Don't believe in it. I was a captain in 
the Spanish War. Ninety per cent of my com- 
pany were no good afterward, spoiled b}^ graft and 
* hand-outs.' By God, this military game has got 
to stop ! That's why I've left my family to scratch 
for a living, and come in. Fighting for fun's all 
right, but not war ! " 



14 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

Sometimes it is intellectual. I sat in the smok- 
ing-room through a rolling afternoon with a 
Princeton graduate, a " casual " on special and 
important service. " I like the thinking part of 
the work," he said as we talked, " but the men get 
on my nerves. They are so monotonous. We 
were all monotonous, grubbing little animals in 
America. There had to be a war to save us. If 
I come back (later he was wounded, " degree un- 
determined ") I'm going in with all my might to 
make life more worth living for the common man, 
poor or rich." 

Sometimes it is naively humorous. Three 
doughboys leaned over the rail, talking of their 
superiors. " The officers are clean-cut and pretty 
well educated," one said, " but they aren't as good 
as the men. I could 'a' been an officer, if I'd waited, 
but this business didn't seem to stand waiting. I'm 
content, as I am. The officers don't take the war 
seriously enough for me." 

These are random instances, but there is noth- 
ing random in the enormous energies that tens of 
thousands of Americans in the army, the Y. M. 
C. A., the Red Cross, and elsewhere have loosed for 
the physical and moral betterment of our men and 
of Europe. Having applied the " uplift " to 
pretty much everything in America, we are now 
trying to uplift war, an undertaking worthy of a 



"TRANSPORT 106" 15 

vigorous and unsophisticated race; and I am not 
sure that we shall not succeed. Certainly in 
twenty years I have not encountered so many vital 
forces incandescent with enthusiasm, so many 
serious-minded, intensely active men working pas- 
sionately for humanity, as in six months' associa- 
tion with the most devastating war in history. 

Germany presents no parallel. Neither does 
France; her efforts are in different (though no less 
valuable) directions. The Briton is as strong to 
save as we ; but the British " uplift " is more polit- 
ical and economic, and in the hands of the intel- 
lectuals and radicals chiefly. It is perhaps better 
thought out, but lacks the fire and universality of 
the American endeavor, which more resembles a 
national religion than a movement for social re- 
form. The moral nerve of America has been set 
vibrating by the war. 

Four-fifths of our Americans aboard, however, 
I should have called earnest- rather than serious- 
minded ; and these are the men who have most 
deeply impressed Europe in her hour of need. Less 
is to be said of them because their psychology is 
simpler. In comparison with the British officers, 
bred at Eton or in the rich tradition of the old 
army, our boys seemed milky, unripe, over-earnest, 
lacking the poise of men of the world, undisciplined 
in mind. They freely told their stories, and these 



16 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

were curiously alike. A hustling five or six years 
of successful business, a wife, a child, a motor-car, 
a big deal ahead, then a switch turned at Wash- 
ington, and their nervous energy slanted toward 
war. 

There was not much clear thinking in this group, 
and no reflection. I could see that Fribourg, the 
Parisian, thought them admirable barbarians. 
Taken one at a time, indeed, they had less individ- 
uality than the English officer, but their group 
energy, their group single-mindedness on the prac- 
tical problem of getting the war won impressed the 
Europeans. Behind their eagerness lay a sense of 
right and duty as vague as the Indian's Great 
Spirit, and in this respect the difference between 
officer and enlisted man was curiously slight. If 
you asked either why we were in the war, you got 
very unsatisfactory answers. The average Amer- 
ican seemingly is not subtle enough to phrase the 
moral-intellectual reasons which set him going, 
although he feels them with a kind of race instinct 
and knows very well that " canning the Kaiser " 
merely saves him the trouble of thinking them out. 
But the earnest, unreflecting energy of these prac- 
tical, intelligent men proved the very medicine for 
a military crisis. They asked in Europe for de- 
tached and statesman-like thinking on world prob- 
lems and we were fortunate enough to have a Pres- 



"TRANSPORT 106" 17 

ident who could give it to them. They asked for 
immediate energy to meet force by fresh force, and 
we gave that also, millions strong. 

It was three Americans with their look of ear- 
nest resourcefulness that Gallenga-Stuart saw — I 
heard him tell the story in London. They were 
taking down the bronze horses from in front of San 
Marco. He watched them carried one by one 
across the lagoon of the Giudecca in the sunset, 
saw the palaces crashed down from the air raids, 
knew that Venice was being abandoned, feared the 
Piave line would not hold, then turned to see three 
Americans in khaki standing together in the piaz- 
zetta, and took heart. 

In striking contrast to the Americans, the Brit- 
ish on Transport 106 exhibited neither moral nor 
nervous intensity, and this difference was true of 
all the castes and breeds represented there. The 
Briton runs from tenacious traditionalism in the 
south, through shrewd commercialism in the mid- 
lands and the north, to cool and educated democ- 
racy in Scotland, and westward to Wales and Ire- 
land in ever-increasing richness of sentiment ; and 
his social order, of course, is stratified in stone. 
But in the dewlapped cockney who had left Lon- 
don only in the flesh, the Indian officer, aristocrat 
of the old army, and the spare Scotch capitalist 
alike, there was a vital difference from our Ameri- 



18 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

cans. I think it was best defined as sense of race, 
something of which we are far less conscious. The 
war, I discovered, and had no cause to change my 
opinion later, was for them a far more intimate, 
personal business than for us. They had moved 
in response to it precisely as the leg moves when 
the knee nerve is struck. Not a man but thought 
and acted in terms of the British tradition; while 
we, even the least reflective among us, were bur- 
dened with the thought, " Now we must create our 
America." 

It was this that explained, I suppose, the diver- 
sity and freedom of opinion on the war that one 
encountered among these British, and found later 
in press, oratory, and private conversation in Eng- 
land. Our straining toward a single view of the 
war seemed unnatural, if not hysterical, to one re- 
turning from Europe ; seemed the very antithesis 
of liberty. But the cause is simple. United (if 
one leaves out Ireland) in the sense of race, the 
British dared be more diverse in sentiment than 
we, dared to let their minds run ahead to recon- 
struction after the war, to the vast problems that 
the military crisis had raised. We were more 
timorous. We put the war on like a garment 
of which we were self-conscious. The Englishman 
carried it as naturally as his skin. 

I remember the first divine service on board, in 



"TRANSPORT 106" 19 

mid-ocean — ports closed, lights lit, the sonorous 
voice of the ship's officer reading sentences from 
Ecclesiastes so poignant that the heart rose to 
meet them : " Wisdom is better than weapons of 
war; but one sinner destroyeth much good." 
" Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all 
thy might: for there is no work, nor device, nor 
knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou 
goest." And from Joel : " Rend your heart, and 
not your garments." One could see these stoic 
phrases in that setting of duty and danger strike 
upon the tense imaginations of the young Ameri- 
cans. To the Briton, they were part of the estab- 
lished service for ships on lawful occasions. Such 
sudden commands to forget individualism and meet 
the crisis appeal not so much to his will and con- 
science as to his fine sense of race. He takes them 
dumbly where he sits, like Masefield's English 
farmers in the poem "October, 1914"; we rise 
and strain forward to respond. 

I could illustrate this vital difference between 
the nations from every deck of Transport 106 as 
we voyaged through the winter ocean, from the 
British and American fronts, from England at 
large, but it is too fundamental, and at the same 
time too little developed, for conclusive illustra- 
tion. Now that victory has inclined our way, and 
the great discussions have begun, the differences 



20 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

between two like-minded peoples, one fighting to 
save and justify her racial best, the other to prove 
her right to responsible nationality, will become 
evident. 

The French on the transport I have mentioned, 
and just mentioned, which accurately defines their 
status. If we had had officers on board it would 
have been different, for we would have sat at their 
feet with questions of strategy. If it had been 
peace-times, and professional matters of literature, 
art, or applied science had concerned us, it would 
have been different. But in that atmosphere of 
international reactions the Parisian officials of our 
company went just so far and no farther. I 
would plod round the deck for hours with the Brit- 
ish major, in silence first, then a word or two, then 
a stream of talk, in which we differed and under- 
stood each other. The British meet as good dogs 
meet — first suspicion, then indifference, then, af- 
ter what seems to us five good minutes wasted, en- 
tire geniality. But when M. Fribourg and I walked 
the pace was fast, the conversation animated and 
radiant with easy friendliness. It sparkled, it 
slackened ; suddenly a fear of boredom came over 
him ; he smiled, he slipped through a doorway, and 
was gone until to-morrow. Our minds touched 
circumferences easily (there is a flexibility in the 
French mind far more American than English), 
bounded along together, then bounced apart. 



"TRANSPORT 106" 21 

Thousands of Americans will come back from 
France bearing testimony to this experience. Talk 
to one of our soldiers now of the Australian, the 
Canadian, the " Tommy," and he will become vol- 
uble in characterization, favorable or unfavorable. 
Ask him about the poilu, and he will say merely : 
" Oh, he's all right. I like him." And that is 
about as far as you get, for it is as far as he has 
gone. Paris is one beam of friendliness now for 
the visiting American, yet even habitues like my- 
self get farther, but only a little farther, into the 
French personality, the Frenchman where he lives, 
than before the war, whereas in England one pro- 
gresses more in a week now than in a year before 
1914. 

And the reason is important. The French are 
at the same time the most civilized and the most 
self-centered of modern nations. Civilization, 
their civilization, is for them what the sense of race 
is for the British. The German propaganda for 
"Kultur " reminds me of a big boy who learns a 
tune and swaggers down the street, threatening to 
lick every little boy that will not whistle it. The 
French have had a better tune for generations, and 
whistled it to themselves. That, by preference, is 
what they will continue to do. Not that they are 
exclusive with their culture. On the contrary, 
Paris has always been open to the foreigner. But 



22 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

you must come to France, France will not come 
to you. The Englishman stays English, but he 
goes all over the world and is interested in the full- 
ness thereof. The Frenchmen on our transport 
had adventured that once to America ; the English 
had been there half a dozen times before the war. 
When I was in Paris the critics were making fun of 
Bourget on account of his taste for traveling. 
What could he see that could not better be seen 
at Paris? Stendhal's vaunted cosmopolitanism 
amounted to liking Milan as well as France. 

World politics for the Frenchman, in fact, is 
simply the problem of preserving intact French 
civilization; his motives therein are negative 
rather than positive. The missionary spirit bled 
out of the race in the Napoleonic era ; the fear of 
being duped, the desire to be "fine " rather than 
energetic, neutralize under ordinary circumstances 
the native love of glory and great spiritual ges- 
tures ; and this balance, far from being a national 
fault, is merely the accompaniment of a perfected 
civilization. We may expect in France a reservoir 
of cool, strong thinking to which a half-barbarized 
world may go to be cured. Indeed, one hears the 
hope frequently expressed that her almost irreme- 
diable depletion of life will be in part made good 
by tens of thousands of Americans and English, 
who, when our vast armies ebb home again, will be 



"TRANSPORT 106" 23 

held by inertia or attraction and become French. 

The Frenchman knows his culture is worth sav- 
ing, and at all costs will save it ; but, as the world 
cannot be made French, he will be willing to leave 
world-planning to his allies. Time and again, as 
our talk on the transport ranged from Japan to 
Chile and dealt with perplexing questions as to how 
a world sweating race prejudice and thinking of 
blows and parryings could be brought into some 
possible order by which all might profit, I saw the 
look in M. Fribourg's face which said " this bores 
me." I had to remind myself that without French 
militar} 7 genius, French coolness and realism, with- 
out, in short, the incomparable mind of French 
civilization, this war would have been lost. 

We were all friends by the time Transport 106 
had reached her " port on the Irish Sea," and 
there had been no international incident except an 
Anglo-American squabble over the best way to 
umpire deck tennis. A common danger, a com- 
mon resolve to down the German, a common liking 
held together our diverse racial personalities. But 
Transport 106, microcosm as she was of the pres- 
ent confederation against Germany, was not nec- 
essarily a prototype of the peace conference. Al- 
lies in war sometimes change their behavior when 
they meet to contrive a new world-order that will 
work for all and (especially) for each. Did these 



24 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

national types, as different as breeds of dogs, 
promise sufficient psychological homogeneity to 
stand the strain? 

If we are to aim, now that the war is over, at a 
mere balance of power among self-centered, ego- 
tistical states, emphatically no. There was too 
much psychology and too little homogeneity 
among these nationals for hope in such a future. 
Give the driving, but none too reflective, energy 
of the American a slant toward commercial dom- 
ination, and it will shatter such fragile interna- 
tionalism like a bomb in a greenhouse. Cloud and 
thicken the racial pride of the British and it turns 
into that obstinate John-Bullism which has 
" r'iled " us and made France furious before. Let 
the French concern for a fine civilization be 
touched with a cynical indifference as to the fate 
of other nations, and her policies will cross more 
often than parallel ours. 

Again, if we are to aim at an international state, 
such as socialists, pacifists, and many historical 
thinkers prophesied before the war, then no hope- 
ful evidence was to be drawn from our transport. 
If we are to expect a truly international state, like 
the later Roman Empire, French, Americans, and 
English should be able, as were the Mediterranean 
races of the fourth century, to exchange environ- 
ments and live mingled together without sensible 



"TRANSPORT 106" 25 

inconvenience. The Briton might succeed in this 
for a while. He bears his race with him. The 
American very seldom. The Frenchman never. 
All might emigrate into a new land like our ances- 
tors and make a new nation, for they intermarry 
without prejudice, which is the first test of homo- 
geneity. But that is a different proposition. 

In truth, only two groups aboard our boat were 
fit for the international state as dreamers have 
devised it. The first comprised the tolerant intel- 
lectual Jews, especially the American Jews. Like 
nursery plants, their roots are close-gathered for 
easy transportation. They understand all races 
and are at home everywhere ; and this makes the 
Jewish intellectual an advance-guard of that in- 
ternationalism which is surely coming, but not in 
our time, nor in the form which theorists have de- 
picted. The others were Irish, the richest-blooded, 
most alive of all our ship's company, always ready 
to turn every argument toward the woes of Ire- 
land, always debating, and never convinced. 
Michael Massey, the last of the O'Donovans, pre- 
siding over every meeting, both cause and judge of 
every altercation, was the incarnation of the uni- 
versal minority, which, being against every con- 
stituted power, is therefore truly international. 
He and his kind are sacred vessels for that idealism 
which never makes compromise with a material 
world run dully on business principles. 



26 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

Is there hope, then, for a federation of nations, 
however rudimentary? As soon as we cease mak- 
ing paper constitutions for it and begin to build 
upon what we have, it will find its sanctions quickly 
and impressively. These racial personalities I 
have been describing are facts that tell neither for 
nor against the probability of world federation. 
They are like the differences in character among 
the individuals who make up a nation. That John 
is a very different fellow from James, and James 
as a personality very unlike Tom, does not prove 
that they will be unable to keep the peace in the 
same village, if village life appeals to them. The 
important question is not their temperamental dif- 
ferences, but rather those similarities in habit and 
desire which make communal living possible. 

Temperamental homogeneity one does not find 
in a village, and racial homogeneity I did not dis- 
cover on Transport 106, but similarity of thought 
in those principles upon which joint action must 
be based was very marked. Our international 
group did sufficiently hold in common ideas of 
equity, of the rights of the individual, and the 
duties of the state ; and if a difference of opinion 
arose, the cleavage, as within a nation, ran between 
temperaments and philosophies, not between local 
or racial units. The Liberal Londoner, the Radi- 
cal Frenchman, the sometime candidate of the Pro- 



"TRANSPORT 106" 27 

gressive Republicans joined forces against the 
Tory M. P., the French legitimist, and the Rhode 
Island judge. And on every question that an in- 
ternational council might have to discuss, there 
was on one side a majority also drawn from all 
nations, and on the other a minority also drawn 
from all nations. This, I submit, is a true basis for 
the only international government we are likely to 
desire in our time — free nations pooling for dis- 
cussion and majority action their questions of in- 
ternational policy, precisely as they have been 
pooling their international trade. 

Transport 106, after all, was a little world, sail- 
ing through space. All the strong desires, pos- 
sessive, belligerent, idealistic, sentimental, moral, 
and immoral, which govern action in the great 
world, were vivid among us. The characters of 
men we represented will be the same in 1920 as 
1918. And if we were sailing in the bond of a 
common purpose to defeat the enemy, nevertheless 
there will be other common purposes in which Brit- 
ish, French, Americans, and (unless history this 
time fails to repeat itself) reconstructed Germans 
can join. It is true that the war has deepened and 
enriched racial personality, and this is most for- 
tunate, for if we come to a federation, its value will 
depend upon the worth of those federated. But 
even while we hesitate and are skeptical of any 



28 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

world order, a homogeneity of thought and emo- 
tion is preparing in which the strongest and most 
individual nations most readily can join. 



II 

ON THE ENGLISH 

What I most envy in the Englishman is his free- 
dom of mind. He is so sure of his loyalties, and 
his prejudices, and his essential relations with the 
island he lives in ; he is so conscious of race that he 
dares to be individual. His character is like 
his climate : it has no angles in it. Looking into 
his mind is like gazing from Piccadilly Circus down 
Regent Street and across the hazy park to hazier 
Parliament towers. It is all blended and misted 
into smoothness, with a good solidity behind. 

What he seems most to envy in us is the defi- 
niteness of our minds, which, like our atmosphere, 
are sharp and clear. He finds them naive and in- 
vigorating; naive because so many things — 
changes, for example in dwelling place, or political 
philosophy, or business systems, or religion — 
seem easy to us ; invigorating because in our 
clearer air we are constantly looking ahead, to 
uplifts, or reforms, or efficiencies. 

When his racial consciousness encounters ours 
there is often a collision. That is because we 
travel on the same line, but with different speeds 
and occasionally in opposite directions. We are 
both blessed and handicapped b} r fundamentally 
understanding each other. Words which in the 

29 



SO EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

mouth of an Italian would not trouble him because 
they would be unheeded, in my mouth rouse him 
to anger. Mannerisms which would amuse me in 
a Frenchman, irritate me sadly if he uses them. 
Why should an Englishman be so affected in ac- 
cent (I say), being after all Anglo-Saxon? Why 
should an American (he says) differ with me in 
opinion, being fundamentally English? And so 
we quarrel easily like two dogs tied to a single 
rope. The best international friendships are be- 
tween English and Americans, and also the live- 
liest (though not the deepest) international preju- 
dices. 

We should therefore send as many Americans as 
possible to England in the years following the war, 
and bring as many English as possible here. It is 
an invaluable experience for us to see what manner 
of men we would have been like if we had not broken 
loose our civilization from its ancient moorings. 
An American is inclined to take stock after such an 
experience. He feels a little flimsy, a little de- 
tached, like a commercial traveler stepping from a 
train into a long-established home. And it will 
be good for the English to feel by contact how 
readily the mind we share in common can slough off 
fat and ancient prejudices, and what happens to 
it when set free. 

Of course we mixed before the war. But that 
was different. We Americans were self-sufficient 
then ; we went abroad to see, not to mix with, our 
ancestral world. Germany was an irritant ; 
France was pleasure ; Belgium a triviality ; Eng- 
land a deep satisfaction mingled with surprise at 



ON THE ENGLISH 31 

the lack of geniality among its inhabitants. We 
never thought of ourselves in relation to a world 
state ; we might well have dropped down from Mars 
with return tickets in our pockets. And as for 
the English, they were still thinking of all the 
English-speaking world as colonials — clever, rich, 
energetic — but still colonials. As late as 1914 
we were still felt to be colonials who must neces- 
sarily think as England thought. We seemed 
therefore mere recreants when we hesitated before 
entering the war. 

It is all changed now. The American has taken 
up the white man's burden of learning to live with 
other white men. He is no longer safe from inter- 
national complications, even in Kansas. And the 
Englishman, in the hour when his fine traits of race 
have turned into steel and met the test, has sud- 
denly dropped his barriers, put on humility, and 
asked to be friends. 

" Why do these British officers say, ' Ah real-ly ' 
and ' Sorry,' and ' Herry on?' " asked two Arkan- 
sas doughboys in St. Valery one day. " Can't 
they talk English! " 

" How can you Americans have central heat- 
ing," murmured the apple-cheeked daughter of an 
Oxford professor, " when you know it's bad for 
the health? " 

Of such inessentials, leading to effrontery on the 
one side and superciliousness on the other, is our 
international prejudice made up. And therefore, 
if we learn to respect racial differences, ours will 
be a great friendship; for our quarrels have been 
the quarrels of relatives and friends. 



BLOOD AND WATER 

I have heard that " blood is thicker than water," 
and that the British are our " cousins " until I am 
sick of these platitudes. Let me try to give some 
better reasons for the faith within us, that the 
compact now formed among English-speaking 
peoples is durable and may solve even harder prob- 
lems than " winning the war." But first I must 
sketch in, no matter how hastily, the traits of con- 
temporary Great Britain, a nation strangely al- 
tered. 

It was in the midst of the confusion of an air 
raid that I began my observations. Indeed, I did 
not know I was in dark London on that night in 
1918 until through the windows of my train I saw 
waving search-lights and stepped into a clatter of 
invisible crowds and the confusing rumble of un- 
seen vehicles. An hour later the signal-guns 
boomed. There was a rush of giggling maids past 
my hotel door, — one was to die the night after, — 
and the voice of the hall porter was heard ordering 
every one below. I followed to a crypt below the 
basement, the farther end of which was open to the 
street. A fainting woman was carried past me; 

32 



BLOOD AND WATER 33 

behind her were little toddlers, sleepy-eyed, with 
coats over their undershirts ; cockneys from the 
near-by slums ; men and women in evening dress ; 
officers — a curious assemblage. Last, as the bar- 
rage fire began to rattle above, came a solemn pro- 
cession of railway guards from the station, each 
with his lantern. One tipped over a biscuit-box 
and offered me an end. " Sit down, sir," he said. 
We sat together and talked of England. " Thank 
God the Americans have come ! " he said. " The 
war is demoralizing England. The labor unions 
are selfish. The people are losing sight of every- 
thing great behind. Their courage is only self- 
preservation." 

Two shaky cockneys with bleared eyes edged up 
beside to listen. A bomb fell, shaking our refuge 
with sullen tremors ; the barrage redoubled. 

" Best throw up the sponge, Ah say," one of 
the cockneys muttered; the twist-back beside him 
agreed. My guard turned upon them angrily. 

" That's you and your kind ! I say Germany 
' 11 'ave to be punished for her sins. We'll see 
this through." The crowd was with him. On the 
steps a group of girls and workmen began to sing; 
bugles sounded the " all clear." Quietly we sep- 
arated. 

Thus I first met England as she was, pessimistic, 
self-critical, determined. Neither hope deferred 



34 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

nor reverses could change this strong determina- 
tion. It was a race trait, displayed in France and 
Flanders and behind every action at home, the 
product of long inheritance, doubly intensified by 
four years of conflict. 

This is the first, and just now the most impor- 
tant quality of that British character which in 
better or in worse we must learn to know more 
sympathetically than we as a nation have known 
any race outside our borders. We shall not 
wholly love it; most probably we shall admire it; 
we must understand its dominant qualities as they 
have been hardened or altered by war. But of 
that curious, dogged determination that makes the 
puny, undersized East-Londoner a better soldier 
for the defensive than either the Australian or the 
Canadian, the American desires merely to be re- 
assured. It is the new humility of the British that 
most needs explanation. 

We have, for example, grossly misunderstood 
the part that Great Britain has played in this war. 
We have taken the Englishman in particular at 
his own published valuation. Now, the English- 
man, although he has a reputation for self- 
superiority, is actually diffident, self-critical, and 
obstinate in national self-depreciation. He has 
filled his papers and our own for four years with 
complaints of his inefficiency and mistakes. He 



BLOOD AND WATER 35 

has written far more of the humorous experiences 
of his " Tommies " than of the remarkable organ- 
ization of the First Expeditionary Army or the 
astounding transformation of central Great Brit- 
ain into a workshop of military supplies, where for 
hours in the train one never lost sight of the ma- 
chinery of war. He has told us far more of the 
asinine incapacity of his leaders than of the 
right-about march of England from the easy ways 
of commerce or leisure, accomplished, one sup- 
poses, under these very men. The British have 
not boasted, they are certainly not boasting now ; 
but with a kind of shamefaced grumble, " we've 
been grousing too much," they are willing as never 
before to be judged. 

The truth is that the Englishman has always 
been fiercely intolerant of the faults of his coun- 
trymen, and therefore, by natural continuation, 
on the defensive against nations without. Nor 
can one deny a belief in racial superiority. It is 
all this that made him the reserved and supercilious 
person who became the "type " Britisher for us 
in America. The trait was preferable to German 
self-assertion, but it was not lovable. And now it 
has changed. To see the " haughty Englishman " 
as he was, you must go to Ireland, where special 
and most unfortunate circumstances still automat- 
ically develop all that is most unhappy in the Brit- 



36 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

ish breed. At home it is a different story. For 
weeks, to cite a trivial instance, I looked for the 
well-known figure who refuses to speak except un- 
der compulsion, and found instead quiet men in 
railway carriages who made excuse of the least in- 
cident of travel to ask for American impressions, 
and would give gladly in exchange from their years 
of bitter experience. At last I met him, churlish, 
silent, cold, as he sat beside me each morning in the 
breakfast-room — only to learn that he was deaf, 
stone-deaf ! 

Or, for a better example, General Sir Archibald 
Murray, late commander of the Palestinian army, 
took me through Aldershot, that marvelous organ- 
ization where every detail, whether in the bombing 
school, the gas school, cavalry, or infantry, is 
devised to train muscle and mind together, an edu- 
cational establishment of the first order, whether 
for war or peace. 

" If we could put all England through such 
training after the war," he said, " the English 
workman could finish his task in six hours a day 
and have time to live and be happy and be a man. 
But now when we do send them through, they kill 
them." 

I saw his point, and realized, too, the essential 
humility of the remark. England was aware of 
its neglects and its failures, and as ready now for 



BLOOD AND WATER 37 

sympathy with its new undertakings as in the past 
it had been indifferent to criticism from without. 

I do not know how effective the British general 
is in the field ; no one will know until long after the 
war. It is certain that he has made his mistakes. 
I do not know how much leadership in a time of 
confusion is to be found in English statesmen. 
Certainly England lacks now such definite leader- 
ship as President Wilson has given America. But 
this I know from experience, and since I am 
estimating racial character rather than racial 
achievement, it is important, in several months of 
association with naval officers, with army officers 
of all ranks, with public officials of all conditions 
from the War Cabinet down, and with a multitude 
of unassorted, not once did I miss the new note. — 
" It has been a hard four years. We are glad 
America is with us. You see that at least we are 
' carrying on.' " 

Yes, once I missed it, in a munition superinten- 
dent traveling with me through northern Wales. 
It was in the midst of the spring offensive. 

" You'll see what England is now," he said. 
" She has to be almost beaten. It was so in Ed- 
ward I's time. It always will be true." This is 
the spirit of determination; but it is precisely not 
the dominant note of this new England which has 
learned with a humility dangerous for arrogant 



38 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

enemies that stubbornness without science and hard 
work and a will for the future as well as a memory 
of the past is not enough. No American remem- 
bering our martial enthusiasm, can guess at the 
burden of armament upon Great Britain, of the 
effect of the daily sacrifice of young life, of the 
darkening of existence that resulted from strain 
long continued. " There is no joy in life now," 
said one of the most vigorous and hopeful of the 
ministry workers. " Spring is a mockery." But 
there was gain as well as loss. 

The third racial characteristic springing to new 
life in this war is energy, but energy of a new kind 
that is worth studying in America. I went through 
vast ranges of clanging shops, airy, well lighted, 
perfect in modern equipment and completeness, 
and all built upon what was swamp or common two 
years ago. I saw I do not know how many thou- 
sands of men and women busy over every instru- 
ment of death devised for this conflict, cheery, 
healthy, content, as seldom before the war. Over- 
all skirts mingle with overall trousers down the 
long lines of machine tools. One sees silk stock- 
ings beneath rough working-garments, jewelry at 
the throat of blackened working-blouses, mob-caps 
on fresh faces of girls who laugh as they turn and 
smooth the shells. An old granny fishes out red- 
hot shell rings like loaves from an oven. A pretty 



BLOOD AND WATER 39 

creature bombards a casting with hammer blows 
in rhythm. 

There is energy in brains, too. Each great gov- 
ernment plant was provided with its enthusiastic 
specialists, captains who begged you to smell their 
new gas, majors who could think only in terms of 
engines, organizers who were passionately eager 
that you should understand in five minutes the 
work of two years. What were these men and 
women before the war? I asked unceasingly; and 
rarely I found a decline in condition. Usually 
energy had been released. It may be disconcert- 
ing to discover that clerks in munition plants were 
once educational experts — few people were 
what they seemed to be in England, — but it was 
thrilling to meet a duke's daughter assembling 
parts, and heartening to find cricketers and fox- 
hunters happy in real work that for thousands a 
year they would not have turned to before, or girls, 
once shop assistants or idle " flappers," now rosy 
from exercise, filing or hammering for good wages, 
or swinging with strong arm-sweeps the passengers 
on board a bus, one grade up at least from the un- 
healthy conditions of our bad world as it was in 
1913. 

But when I saw the finished product of all this 
new energy, great howitzers beside their vast car- 
riages, shells by the million, hangars of flying- 



40 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

boats (sperm-whales with broad wings, each a 
marvel undreamed of in last year's philosophy), 
aerodromes like wing^encircled pigeon-houses, ships 
of enormous length, rising, like Mulciber's palace, 
to the reverberating music of a thousand ham- 
mers and drills; when I went on the gray, silent 
cruisers, miracles of human ingenuity, crouching 
in coast harbors, each with its sea-plane like a 
dragon-fly above the prow ; and saw the trawlers, 
the chasers, the submarines, the destroyers, little 
and big, that, born of this vast energy, could sweep 
and harry the sea for thousands of miles, why, 
then I was driven back upon the cynical thought 
that must come again and again to every one who 
saw the activities of Great Britain doubled in aid 
of death. Can England, which the Germans 
thought decadent, and we effete, renew its youth 
only to destroy? 

No, there is more than galvanic activity in this 
new energy of Great Britain. It will last after 
the war, because it is inspired by something more 
than self-preservation. It springs from sources 
too little explored in our old industrial system, 
from the innate, perhaps the inherited, desire of 
the gregarious animal to work for larger issues 
than his own food and his master's pocket-book. 
As a girl in a munition plant waited for the frame 
to bring the next shell to her tool, I asked : 



BLOOD AND WATER 41 

"Do you like the work? Are you happy 
here? " 

She answered as she caught and turned the 
shell : 

" 0f course. I get good wages. And then I've 
got a boy in France. I make the shells. He 
shoots them." 

Humanitarians may object to this story, but 
the principle is sound. Millions in England and 
America have been working with a consciousness 
that they were earning more than their wages, and 
that the surplus was going not to stockholders or 
employers, but for the common welfare of all. It 
is ironical, if not pathetic, that war, the greatest 
destroyer of goods, was necessary in order to es- 
tablish in effective practice a truth we have long 
known, but neglected. 

This generous, light-hearted, independent en- 
deavor is not a purely British virtue, as I well 
know ; but it has had, I think, its first and best re- 
lease there. It has been safeguarded by a labor 
policy that Americans have criticized with little 
knowledge of the facts ; and though sprung from 
conflict, it is not, as in Germany, tied fast to a 
state that protects and encourages its subjects 
only that they may be more fit for war. If the 
words of great employers can be trusted, and the 
plans of the reconstructionists and the desires of 



42 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

powerful labor leaders, this old-new discovery will 
not be forgotten with the coming of peace, and the 
new and better-directed British energy will remain. 

Here, then, are three dominant traits of the new 
England. The first an American must admire, 
for his ancestors possessed it, and he hopes that he 
still retains it. The second warms his heart, as its 
absence would have chilled him. The third he wel- 
comes as his own best-admired virtue. And all 
three should make it easier for us to like and un- 
derstand Great Britain as the war has molded it. 
But the crisis is too grave, the corner we are turn- 
ing in the world's history too sharp, to rest hopes 
for the future upon manifestations of character, 
no matter how significant they may be for the 
better understanding of two great peoples. In- 
deed, that these British qualities stir a response in 
us might mean little for our relationship if it were 
not for another factor of the highest political im- 
portance. The Germans lack neither energy nor 
determination, and they with Austria now aspire 
toward humility ; but no upspringing love is 
thereby engendered in our breasts. It is different 
with the British, for with them and with the races 
they have fathered we are essentially like-minded. 
This is a kinship much truer than the highly wa- 
tered Anglo-Saxonism that is supposed to unite us. 

I do not of course mean anything so improbable 



BLOOD AND WATER 43 

as an identity of feeling. No one expects pre- 
cisely the same reactions to ideas and experience 
in a Hoosier of German descent and a Shropshire 
farmer. Indeed, it is easy to find whole sets of 
conditions, some trivial, some important, where 
the British and the American will never come to- 
gether. The English conception of food, for ex- 
ample, as something to be calculated by mass in- 
stead of by taste is quite un-American; but let 
that pass. Or again, an American in Ireland 
finds that his most violent urging against the ex- 
tremists can make him no enemies, while the most 
concessive Englishman can make no friends. This 
is a political factor to which I shall return, but it 
may serve here as proof that I am advancing no 
argument for the complete brotherhood of the 
English-speaking races. 

Nor am I insinuating that France and America 
are not in many respects in extraordinary agree- 
ment. Their ideals, especially as regards the free- 
dom of the mind and the worth of the individual 
man, are much alike, and this is the best guaran- 
tee of mutual faith after the war. Furthermore, 
French thought touches the American imagination 
with curious ease and with results most beneficial. 
But the better one knows the French, and appre- 
ciates their unique and highly self-contained civili- 
zation, their tradition of the family, their view of 



44 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

how to live, the clearer it is that the French and 
ourselves will remain the best of friends and ad- 
mirers without being like-minded. As a now fa- 
mous American said recently, to learn to know the 
real France is to admire as a woman of thirty the 
girl you loved from a distance in youth. 

With the English-speaking races — Americans, 
Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, Irish, 
English, Scotch, and Welsh — the story is a dif- 
ferent one. It was borne in upon me first by the 
sight of Australian soldiers on leave in London. 
Fine, bronzed fellows, with clear eyes and a reck- 
less swing to their limbs, they so absolutely placed 
themselves as recruits from our Rocky Mountain 
States that their unexpected accent was always 
a shock. Blood relationship? No, blood rela- 
tionship evidently had little to do with it ; for the 
Westerners with whom I identified them might be 
named Blankenberg or Fitzenheimer. It was like 
conditions that had produced like results, and the 
likeness had extended to more than broad spaces, a 
free life, and a new world in the making. 

I wish we had a term for the variety of world 
civilization that has extended itself over the Eng- 
lish-speaking countries, and deeply affected many 
where English is'only a lingua franca. It is Brit- 
ish in origin, of course ; but to tell an Irishman or 
a German-American that his culture is British does 



BLOOD AND WATER 45 

not further world peace. Nor is it true, for the 
like-mindedness I am trying to describe long since 
passed from British control. To call it an Anglo- 
Saxon culture is equally unfortunate. If it 
were, then only Anglo-Saxons would be like- 
minded ; whereas the bond of which I write links 
the Anglo-Danish-Norman-Celtic Englishman and 
the Anglo - French - Dutch - German - Celtic " old 
American " with the pure German or the pure 
Italian of the second generation in America. 

If we break free from some of the nonsense 
about races and look at the facts in our own coun- 
try, the thing becomes clearer. Here are a dozen 
or more races in the slow progress of amalgama- 
tion, all living in the same environment, all 
studying (and this is enormously important) the 
same text-book (your text-book is your great lev- 
eler), all subject to the same general ideals of what 
life is for, what success means, how a country 
should be governed, how a man should treat his wife 
and bring up his children. It is absurd to suppose 
that this makes them all into Americans of the type 
we developed before the Civil War. No, the ideals, 
the text-books, the very character of the nation, 
are all altering in response to the new blood. But 
the change is in degree, not in kind. The essential 
qualities of the English-speaking culture (if I 
must use a term) with which we began, remain the 



46 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

same, though lightened by the French and Italians, 
given humor by the Irish, and tolerance by the 
Jews. And this in a lesser degree has happened in 
Canada and Australia, while New Zealand, the 
youngest offshoot, proves how far the original 
stock may vary without infusion of alien blood. 
I venture to assert that the son of an Italian, 
having graduated from an American high school, 
can better understand the ideas of a Manchester 
boy of the same age, despite vast differences in 
temperament, than the point of view of an eight- 
een-year-old Neapolitan, even if, as is by no means 
certain, he can talk to him in Italian. I know that 
this war has brought a revelation to many Amer- 
icans abroad. They have found it difficult to re- 
member that the Canadians are not fellow-coun- 
trymen. They have found that the native Brit- 
isher of every class who at first, in his restraint 
or in his mannerisms, burlesqued on our stage time 
out of mind, has seemed to belong to another world, 
is after a little acquaintance curiously familiar. 
The differences that once irritated become a source 
of pleasure. There is a breakdown of alien feel- 
ing, so that your very accents become passports 
to good understanding. A fellowship is estab- 
lished that comes from looking differently and 
talking differently and thinking just about the 
same. " You Americans and hus ought to 'ave 



BLOOD AND WATER 47 

been in it before together, Ah sy," says my table 
mate at " The Fish and Anchor." It was not an 
appeal; it was a testimonial. 

Again, I talked recently of a possible league of 
nations with a man responsible in no small meas- 
ure for Great Britain's policies. The French and 
Italians, he said, regard the League of Nations as 
an idea belonging particularly to the British Em- 
pire and to America. They would gladly join in 
a new world order, once it became effective, but the 
hope of it, and the desire to realize it at all costs, 
appertain to an order of thinking and experience 
different from their hard training in nationalism. 

Or still again, the special brand of moral in- 
dignation aroused in the English-speaking world 
by German aggression is quite different from the 
perhaps clearer-sighted self-defense of the French. 
No reader of French books of the last three years 
can have failed to observe how fundamental is the 
belief of France that she was defending a unique 
civilization which was to liberalize, not subdue, the 
world. Her endeavor was beyond praise, but it 
differed, nevertheless, in character, if not in ob- 
ject, from our binding passion for a " square 
deal " and the rights of nations to follow their 
destinies. In this, English speakers everywhere 
were like-minded; so much so that the German- 
American, who has no love for England and owes 



48 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

her nothing except through the common American 
inheritance, nevertheless opposed himself whole- 
heartedly to men of his own blood whose minds in 
matters of war and politics had become different 
from his own. 

If, then, we speakers of English of all races are 
in a few essentials like-minded, let us unhesitatingly 
apply this fact of supreme historical importance 
to the test of the present and the hope of the 
future. How can we realize those ideals of a better 
international order that now, to most sane men, 
are the final, though not the sole, justification for 
the losses of the war? Only by finding and 
strengthening that common will which resides in 
like-minded communities, able to feel and think and 
act together in a common cause. In America and 
the British nations such groups are dominant. In 
America and the British nations, now that France 
and Italy have been drained in mere self-preserva- 
tion, is to be found the surplus of power to make 
sane construction arise upon the ruins of destruc- 
tion, and direct what is still a doubtful conclusion 
toward ends profitable for the world. 

I do not for a moment intend to imply that ideal- 
ism and a desire for a cleaner future are confined 
to the English-speaking peoples. We have plenty 
of allies here, even among the enemy. Russia, in 
her fashion, is certainly with us. But the definite 



BLOOD AND WATER 49 

purpose to make a better organization emerge 
from this struggle is, as is natural, best felt by 
America, the least involved of the belligerents in 
ancient entanglements. And our ideas are best 
understood by the nations most like-minded, Great 
Britain and her Dominions. In us is a power and 
a will to forget old ambitions and work in joint 
leadership, not, God grant it, for an " Anglo- 
Saxon bloc " and a new balance of power, but 
rather toward a federation realizable for us now, 
and which France and Italy, in all surety, and 
a reconstructed Germany will be glad to share. 

But we must first prove our ability to federate 
ourselves. Perhaps no man alive has had more 
experience with national federation than Lord Mil- 
ner. Here is his opinion as he gave it to me in a 
conversation which touched upon the subject of 
which I am writing: 

" Americans are like us, and we ought to work 
well together. The present situation proves that 
we must work together. The League of Nations 
is right enough, but there is one league in existence 
now, the British Empire. I say to our interna- 
tionalists, * You talk of all the world sitting down 
at one table, and here is a league in working order 
that you don't give a hang for.' And now Amer- 
ica must stick with us. I am called an imperialist 
for talking so much of the British Empire. Why, 



50 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

what imperialism is there in England and Austra- 
lia and Canada? We all do as we please. There 
should be an understanding between America and 
England which would make war as impossible as 
between England and Australia. It may be that 
only one system of thinking and governing will 
prevail on earth; but it is quite conceivable that 
militarism, or whatever you choose to call the Ger- 
man method, may suit certain countries. In any 
case, at present and perhaps for some time to 
come (the war was not over when he spoke), it is 
likely to prevail there. Eventually our ideal will 
win, must win ; but not unless we who believe in it 
can learn how to hold together." It would be well 
if we Americans gave more thought to the oppor- 
tunities already at hand in the English-speaking 
world for beginning world federation. 

The risks attending the association of so many 
like-minded countries are of course evident. I see 
the danger of attempting to impose Anglo-Amer- 
ican " democracy " upon nations that rightly pre- 
fer another kind ; the danger of a new and gigan- 
tic imperialism; the danger of frightening the 
world into some vast opposing coalition. But it 
is certain that American leadership, like American 
common sense, is committed to a policy in sharp- 
est conflict with such recurrences of ancient error. 
And no observer in England can doubt that the 



BLOOD AND WATER 51 

majority sentiment in Great Britain is with us in 
this respect, bound to us by self-interest as well 
as by sympathy and a common desire. We must 
strike out boldly and truly on these lines or pre- 
pare for heavy failure. The alternative is world 
disorganization. 

If, however, salvation is to be sought through 
the like-mindedness of our peoples, then it is not 
formal engagements, but the concurrence of dumb 
desires which in the long run will hold them to- 
gether. And an American, speaking for his own 
nation, should not be afraid to write down the 
difficulties in the path. 

There are, for example, the American preju- 
dices against Great Britain, and particularly 
against England, which common aims and better 
knowledge may overlay, but will not of themselves 
remove. Some of these prejudices are merely sen- 
timental, as is some of our affection for France ; 
some of them are honestly based and must be hon- 
estly encountered. They are the more serious 
because England for years to come will be our 
point of contact with the politics of the British 
Empire. 

Most intense is the Irish distrust of everything 
English that spreads down through the second and 
third generation of Irish-Americans. The Irish 
and the English, in fact, are the least like-minded 



52 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

of all the English-speaking nations. But Ireland 
is as pro-American as she is anti-English, and the 
Irish-American has become more like-minded with 
the British than his grandfather would have be- 
lieved possible. America has the power, if she has 
the will, to explain Ireland to England and Eng- 
land to Ireland; and they sorely need it. Hope, 
then, balances fear in this direction. 

Less passionate, but more deep-seated, is the 
passive resistance of our non-British races — 
Jews, Germans, Italians, Slavs, and Scandinavians 
— to common action with an empire the traditions 
of which are sharply different from their own. If 
our purpose were to Anglicize America, this diffi- 
culty might well be insuperable. But no such na- 
tional suicide is contemplated. These races, alien 
only as the Dutch, the Huguenots, and the Low 
Germans were alien to the English of our colonies, 
have accepted our English-speaking civilization, 
have modified and improved it, making it more 
flexible and, I hope and believe, more fruitful than 
the parent stock. In entering the English-speak- 
ing bond they have increased, not lessened, the 
opportunity for international like-mindedness. 

Our schools have been a chief factor in this de- 
velopment. But they have succeeded because it 
was written down that they should succeed, not 
with the conscious purpose which must now be 



BLOOD AND WATER 53 

grasped. How fantastically wrong is the history 
of the American Revolution which most of us stud- 
ied in youth, wherein George III appears as the 
type of the England of his day, and Burke is a 
voice crying in a wilderness ! If patriotism could 
be stirred only by misrepresenting the foreigner, 
then this last and most stupid breeding of preju- 
dice would be at least understandable. But we 
must be rid of it. 

These are real difficulties. Let us not add to 
them by building upon false hopes. I do not be- 
long to that group of optimists who think that 
combats together on a bloody field for a common 
cause insure for all time the fellowship of nations. 
Such is not the lesson of history. Soldiers have 
fought side by side one year and face to face the 
next too often to build upon that shallow belief. 
In the confusion of the next decade it is all too 
probable that the material interests of the English- 
speaking peoples may conflict on issues which in 
the past have made wars. It is folly to expect 
agreement because we have fought against a com- 
mon enemy. It is good sense to strive and hope 
for agreement because of our hundred years' his- 
tory of peace, because now as never before we re- 
act alike to the great impulse of this epoch, like 
each other when we meet, and have a common lan- 
guage of the mind as well as of the tongue. But 



54 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

it will never be easy, as the orator would have us 
believe, for the most like-minded of nations to re- 
main inseparable. 

And yet at the last I must inscribe myself opti- 
mist; for optimism just now is the function of 
America. Western Europe is worn and weary and 
a little cynical. Europe seeks rest, regardless of 
what may come after. We of the farther West, 
with our naive enthusiasm and our unsapped en- 
ergy, must supply the impulse toward large issues. 
Help in the battles of the past we offered to the 
Allies. Escape from the perils of the future may 
come if we learn to see eye by eye with Britons, 
Canadians, Australians, as our Poles and Italians 
and Germans have learned to see eye by eye with 
us at home. Let us set no bounds to our hope. 



Ill 

ON IRISH LITERATURE 

Ireland's best case is to be found in her liter- 
ature; and if she were to be represented, as the 
aggrieved one, in the congress of English-speaking 
countries, I would have her represented by a book. 
I do not mean a book on the " Irish question " — 
that would be enough to disrupt any conference! 
I mean a group of lyrics by Yeats, or selections 
from the prose of George Russell or Standish 
O'Grady, or best of all by far, a play by Synge — 
and the less politics and Celtic twilight in it the 
better. 

There are a thousand things, economic, com- 
mercial, religious, geographical, prejudicial, irri- 
table, and disreputable that count for Ireland, but 
only one which has breathing, human interest for 
an Australian or an American — and that is not 
the body, but the soul of Ireland. He will not 
admit it perhaps, or be conscious of it, for we do 
not talk of souls in America (and I suppose Aus- 
tralia) except on Sundays and in sermons. He 
might be shocked to be told that even the easy Irish 
humor that made a background for him in boyhood 
has something to do with soul. 

It has; and it is just one among many Irish 
forms of escape, escape from the rather tiresome 

55 



56 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

efficiencies ; escape from a cut-and-dried economic 
and respectable view of the universe ; escape from 
ugliness of the body into beauty of the mind. I 
do not mean an escape to Angus and Dana and the 
other Celtic gods who seem to be local celebrities 
after all, a bit overwritten in a publicity campaign 
to put them beside the old favorites of classic Eng- 
lish literature (a form of Bolshevikism this, an 
attack by the Irish proletariat upon the vested 
interests of the Greek and Latin deities). They 
have their place, but it is the persistent and suc- 
cessful escape of the Irish mind into sorrow and 
joy and reverence and love, irrespective of binding 
circumstance ( Synge's " Playboy of the Western 
World " is an example) that engages the world. 
For it is getting harder, this escape, for us all, in 
measure as life becomes standardized and our emo- 
tions are educated into a norm of mediocrity. We 
welcome a rebel who fights for a warm, illogical, 
interesting idealism. And such a rebel is Ireland. 
We share her discontent, while condemning her 
discontented who possess our civilization without 
being able comfortably to live within it. We our- 
selves are illogical in such an attitude ; and there- 
fore probably are right. We love Ireland because 
she speaks for the rebel in all of us : we wish to 
see her " pacified " because we have found no way 
by which rebellion against the ugliness of our mod- 
ern world can be reconciled with our daily task 
of making it more efficient. But is there a way? 



THE IRISH MIND 

I was a plain American, interested, but a little 
naive, when I entered Ireland in the spring of 1918. 
I believed then, like most Americans, that Ireland 
should have come wholeheartedly into the war ; and 
I think so still, except that I know now that Ire- 
land will have suffered most because she stayed 
lukewarm. I believed, like most Americans, that 
Home Rule was a good thing and should be put 
through ; and I still so believe, but see the complex- 
ity of the problem. I was a little weary, as are 
most Americans, of the endless fuss over Ireland 
while the world was burning; but now I realize 
that, however insignificant in a universal conflict 
may seem the Irish political squabble, the mind of 
Ireland is important, is significant for us and the 
future, and is deeply misunderstood by general 
friend and general foe in America. 

I hear in the clubs, " Who is interested in Ire- 
land? " and I wish to answer, " Millions of Irish- 
men in America and Canada and Australia, and in 
our armies in France, who are storing up confusion 
and bitterness." The question was a foolish one. 

57 



58 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

I hear, " What difference does it make what hap- 
pens to Ireland? " and my answer is, " Will it make 
no difference for the future if in Ireland demo- 
cratic government scores a conspicuous failure? " 

It was my privilege to see in London the library 
of German propaganda printed for neutral coun- 
tries and captured in the course of the war. Half 
of it treated of race-problems, and of that half, 
two-thirds was on Ireland. Do we still sneer, as 
in 1914, at German propaganda? 

I entered Ireland by the green hills of Ulster, 
and moved freely through County Antrim and 
Belfast. I talked there with bishops and deans 
of the Church of Ireland, and fine upstanding 
generals and county families in their walled gar- 
dens — friendly people, solid, simple, more vol- 
uble than the Scotch, but with hard-gripping 
minds like theirs, that took one thing at a 
time and wrung it. They had worked for their 
comfort, made prosperous land out of a waste of 
whin and gorse and would keep it against Prussian 
or Sinn Feiner — that was my impression. Spec- 
ulation upon world-politics did not interest them; 
they knew little of the new England, less of Amer- 
ica ; the war was the war, and they intended to 
fight it out — that was all there was to that sub- 
ject. They were a perfect type of the genus 
Tory, with his limitations, and especially with his 



THE IRISH MIND 59 

virtues of self-reliance, self-respect, and the stead- 
iness which comes from caste. 

I talked with bankers and manufacturers and 
gardeners and cabbies — Presbyterians this group 
and representing the Orange wing of the Ulster 
party, but, like the others, proud of Belfast and 
of the relative prosperity of the North of Ireland. 
Belfast is a black city, a depressing city, full of 
overdriven faces, but full of energy, too, and the 
signs of success. Here it was religion one heard 
about, and the dangers of Roman Catholic domi- 
nation ; it was customs and excises and the fear of 
a lazy South battening upon Northern taxes that 
they talked of; it was the shiftless Celt, who still 
gets his water from rain-barrels and yet thinks he 
can run the country ; the Pope and the £42,000 he 
draws annually from Ireland, " And how much 
would he be getting under Home Rule? " And I 
formed, I think, a just idea of the " case " of the 
North — her right to safeguard her economic 
prosperity, the honest fear of a vote controlled by 
the church, her unwillingness to let slack, spend- 
thrift Dublin run neat, orderly Belfast. But I 
left, wondering why these sturdy Scotch-Irish folk 
were so timorous. Why, unlike their ancestors in 
the colonies, they dared not run risks in order to 
gain the benefits of a united island ; why these 
builders of ships and weavers of linen, who alone 



60 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

had made commerce and local government success- 
ful in Ireland, were so resolute to cling to Eng- 
land's skirts, even at the cost of perpetuating Irish 
division and rancor among their own minorities ; so 
afraid to venture union with a people whose prac- 
tical efficiency they despised. For while all in the 
North argued their right to stay in the Union, no 
one supposed that this would satisfy anyone in 
Ireland but themselves and a few Unionists of the 
South. 

Later I traveled south through the meadows of 
County Down and past those dim beautiful moun- 
tains of Mourne, in a country so rich and so peace- 
ful that one could not but reflect uneasily upon the 
men who kept it in turmoil. My compartment was 
full of officers of the British army of occupation ; 
in the villages I saw children half naked and wholly 
dirty ; on a platform was chalked, " Down with 
Home Rule," and " Fight for every country ex- 
cept your own." And so I came to beautiful, 
disheveled Dublin, a city of the soul, with dirty 
finger-nails and a torn dress and a nasty temper 
and a voice of the angels. 

While I lived in Dublin I saw much of Nation- 
alists and those intenser Nationalists who, in 
all but republicanism, are really Sinn Feiners. 
I talked with friends of George Moore and 
the Celtic twilight, who loved me because I 



THE IRISH MIND 61 

was an American, and insulted me in the 
hope of surprising an admission that America 
came into the war " bought by English gold." I 
talked with M in his workroom frescoed with Cel- 
tic gods, where he strides from his mountainous 
desk of pamphlets to paint in an Irish scene, then 
turns back to economics, or pure milk, or poetry. 
A black-bearded man with burning eyes and a voice 
that chants, he gave me my first idea of the in- 
tensity of life in Ireland. 

I talked with poets consuming in an hour a 
week's rations of emotion. I talked with John 
MacNeil, ascetic, intellectual leader of the Sinn 
Fein party, whose judgment kept the Easter re- 
bellion from becoming a national disaster; who 
thought clean and cool on all points except the re- 
lations between England and Ireland. I talked 
with radical priests ; with Unionists in government 
service, who, after a second glass of port, became 
equally Irish and almost as radical ; with scholars, 
business men, women, intellectuals ; and began to 
see that nationalism in Ireland (I mean the emo- 
tion, not the party) was a religion; was a passion 
so strong that arguments which ignored it for 
questions of efficiency or profit were untrust- 
worthy. 

I met, too, the wilder Sinn Feiners, in assemblies 
which began at indefinite hours and lasted indefi- 



62 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

nitely. There were labor leaders present, whose 
sense of Ireland's international responsibilities 
was struggling with distrust of what they thought 
was an " English war." No one in a press cen- 
sored with more vigor than intelligence had ex- 
plained to them why it was also America's. There 
were destructive radicals, who added to Ireland's 
hereditary grievances all grievances that the sup- 
posedly downtrodden have voiced anywhere, and 
slid from Bolshevikism into Nationalism, and from 
Nationalism into pacifism, with easy inconsistency 
accompanied by vituperation. There were fanatic 
women who kept their watches an hour and twenty- 
five minutes behind the official time, because " sum- 
mer time " was an English invention and real Irish 
time ought to be twenty-five minutes slower still. 
There were melancholy idealists, pure of motives, 
noble of heart, drunk with vision and with wrath ; 
and truculent chaps with angry eyes and a general 
expression of having been kept too long out of a 
fight. To them all I talked America and American 
ideals in the war, not hesitating to express views 
in sharpest conflict with their own; and I was 
sometimes agreed with, usually understood, always 
listened to tolerantly. (Except for an excited 
poetess, who challenged me because in our own 
Civil War we had thrown the tea into Boston har- 
bor while now we were tied to the apron-strings of 



THE IRISH MIND 63 

Britain!) For as the Irishman once looked to 
Spain and then to France, so now he looks to 
America for sympathy. And I came away con- 
vinced that the so-called Pro-Germanism of Sinn 
Fein (a very few individuals excepted) was like 
much of their extremist politics, mere froth and 
spume floating up from a troubled mind out of 
joint with the times and mishandled by those in 
authority, signifying rebellion against circum- 
stance but no treason. And with this conclusion 
I find the calmer sense of England agrees. 

Afterwards I saw much of Sir Horace Plunkett 
and the Moderates of the South, in the exciting 
days when the Convention was closing, and just 
before conscription, at the moment of expected 
preliminary settlement, struck Dublin into a mute 
rage in which fear and indignation had equal 
parts ; the time when the extremists of either party 
were seeking walls against which to set their backs. 

It was easy to admire the system of agricultural 
cooperation, founded by Sir Horace, which is mak- 
ing rural Ireland comfortable ; easy to sympathize 
with the belief of many Moderates, both Catholic 
and Protestant, that poverty and waste and alco^ 
hoi are more dangerous to Ireland than England, 
or Orange Ulster, or radical Sinn Fein. The 
imagination warmed to a program, not exclu- 
sively political, which would make of Ireland, not 



64 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

a second-class England, but a civilization based, 
like Denmark's, upon scientific agriculture, free 
as might be from the evils of industrialism, yet suc- 
cessful and populous. I remembered that Ireland 
had halved her population in the past while Great 
Britain had been doubling hers. I considered that 
the years between 1914 and 1918 have not demon- 
strated the surpassing value of a civilization 
molded by industrial countries where the normal 
life is of the factory or the sweat-shop ; and I 
wondered why such a program seemed so little 
to interest political Irishmen; why we heard so 
little of it in America. It was like a cool draft 
after the chill of Ulster commercialism, the vapor- 
ous heat of Sinn Fein ideology ; but it was clearly 
not the accepted potion for Ireland's ills — yet. 

Night after night I talked half the night 
through in Ireland, and I was showered with doc- 
uments from every party — books, leaflets, letters, 
statistics, reports, clippings, economic solutions, 
religious solutions, political solutions, complaints, 
until, as I looked over my desk, all Ireland seemed 
to be shouting in print, " This is what I want ; this 
is what will cure me " ; and no two voices cried 
alike. 

Later, in England, the complexity of the prob- 
lem was only increased ; for England realizes, as 
America seemingly does not, that Ireland cannot 



THE IRISH MIND 65 

go on as she is without clogging the wheels of in- 
ternational progress ; and there is no man in any 
party who does not have his bitter opinion as to 
what thing is best to do. And of course I formed 
my own opinion which, unimportant though it is, 
I shall probably be unable to keep out of this es- 
say. But more important than any opinion seemed 
the conviction borne in upon me that all things I 
had seen and heard were symptoms of some inner 
malady. That, at least for us Americans, it was 
better to sweep away all statistics and documen- 
tary solutions, discourage the pamphleteer and the 
writer of letters to the press, and try to under- 
stand the Irish before we took a hand in the uni- 
versal game of solving the Irish question on paper. 
And I found myself equally convinced that the 
humblest attempt was worth while, not only be- 
cause the steady earnestness of Ulsterism and the 
invigorating Nationalism of Sinn Fein are the best 
fruits of Ireland, but also because these lovable, 
vivid Irish have disappointed us in the war, be- 
cause they puzzle and irritate us, because it will 
be so easy for us, as for them, to make irrevocable 
mistakes. 

To begin then with apparent but not real harsh- 
ness, if I may be allowed to present my diagnosis, 
the atmosphere of Ireland is psychopathic, and 
the Irish, South and North, and, what is more 



66 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

curious, the English who are sent to rule them, all, 
at one time or another and in different fashions, 
manifest clear symptoms of abnormality. Ireland 
is like those interesting abnormal cases which spe- 
cialists have to handle, where the patient is some- 
times a genius and sometimes subnormal, where 
every trait that is really characteristic, good or 
bad, is magnified until it threatens to crush all the 
others. There have been many such cases among 
famous individuals, — Poe was one, Nietzsche was 
another, — and science seeks them out keenly be- 
cause by their exaggeration of traits common to 
humanity they have become large-print books in 
which the qualities of modern man can be easily 
read. But an abnormal nation is dangerous to 
itself and others because it cannot, like a patient, 
be kept under easy observation ; because it may at 
any moment carry through the unexpected, ruin- 
ous act. Yet, even in partial derangement, it may 
exhibit, for the world to read, virtues as well as 
vices more emphatic than those of less turbulent 
races. 

The fanatic patriotism of the radical Sinn 
Feiners is abnormal. It burns so intensely that 
their judgment is affected. Great Britain, in 
spite of her creditable world-history, in spite of her 
modern leadership in social reform, they see only 
through the darkening lens of Irish history. Ha- 



THE IRISH MIND 67 

tred of England is like a hand before their eyes ; 
and the balked vision turns back always upon the 
woes of Ireland. Their grievances are real ones, 
— especially the historical grievances which mean 
much to Irishmen, — but they are magnified. Sir 
Horace Plunkett's epigram, " Anglo-Irish history 
is for Ireland to forget and for England to remem- 
ber," has been applied on neither side of the Chan- 
nel. And their own virtues are also magnified — 
the strengths and the loyalties and the ideals of 
their patriotism. Ireland is full of men who are 
willing to die for a principle, although they can- 
not agree with each other as to which principle to 
die for. " I want to fight in this war," I heard an 
Irish poet say ; " I want to be conscripted ; but I 
think I ought to let myself be shot for refusing. I 
don't mind dying, but I should like to die for Ire- 
land." Particularistic patriotism this is, like the 
patriotism of Prussia ; but if it is less practically 
effective, it is also far nobler. Intense and fine 
and also self-regarding, it is the patriotism of my 
country right or wrong and the devil take the rest 
of the world. In brief, it is the patriotism of the 
man who has a genius for being just patriotic — 
who is, thus far, abnormal. 

Ulster, with her determined " stand-patism," is 
abnormal in quite another sense. Is there such a 
thing as abnormal normality? If so, Ulster has 



68 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

it. It is normal to care for one's pocket-book, to 
distrust visionaries, to prefer a low tax-rate to 
soap-box oratory. Telephone Belfast, they say, 
and your business is done in five minutes. Tele- 
phone Cork, and it takes fifteen. Telephone Dub- 
lin, and they reply, " Ah, call again to-morrow." 
It is normal to be proud of a clever, hard-headed 
community which is as pleased with the status quo 
as most of us were before 1914. But to be as 
wholly and successfully Tory as the ruling class in 
the North of Ireland is abnormal. The Bourbons 
were also abnormal in this respect, but the Bour- 
bons were stupid and Ulster is not. She merely 
manifests a typical case of being completely sat- 
isfied with the state of life into which it has pleased 
God to call one. All she wants is to be let alone ; 
1913 (English Liberals say 1774) was quite good 
enough for her ; there would be no desire for change 
in Ireland if mischief-makers would keep their 
mouths shut. The war is a good war; her sys- 
tem of industries based upon cheap labor is a good 
system ; the Protestant religion is a good religion ; 
all is for the best — as the Deist-Tories of the 
eighteenth century used to say, — if only Dublin 
and the Liberals and the Labor Party would let 
well enough alone. 

It is not surprising that Ulster has been popu- 
lar with a British government which had to keep 



THE IRISH MIND . 69 

the Empire going in war-time; but such a warm- 
hearted desire to stop the clock is certainly ab- 
normal. These fine, steady, self-reliant Scotch- 
Irish, full of Puritan dogmatism and practical ef- 
ficiency, are museum specimens exhibiting in its 
unmixed condition the conservatism possible to 
man. Indeed, when one breaks away from the 
fold, he becomes, not a moderate, but a radical 
Nationalist like George Russell, or a Sinn Feiner 
like John MacNeil, and puts drive into the ideas 
of the opposite party. Everywhere in the world 
except in Ulster they are wondering what will hap- 
pen after the war. Ulster knows — nothing will 
happen ! 

It cannot be denied also that, by some curious 
process of infection, the actions of the British gov- 
ernment in Ireland have become abnormal also by 
comparison with their procedure elsewhere. The 
friends of the government praise its attempts to 
conciliate or its efforts to " hold down " Ireland, 
according to their views, but wonder at the incon- 
sistency of doing both together. The enemies of 
the government maintain that no policy what- 
soever is to be found, but only the resultant of 
attempts to soothe the party which at a given time 
is likely to make the most trouble. 

The truth is that it is extremely difficult to 
handle abnormal conditions and keep your head. 



70 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

A wise Cabinet proposed to accept the report of 
the Irish Convention, and then, in spite of imper- 
fections, to pledge itself to put through its moder- 
ate proposals. A perturbed Cabinet, on the day 
the report was delivered, announced immediate 
conscription in Ireland, even though knowing that 
this would make impossible any " Moderate " solu- 
tion. A panicky Cabinet, a little later, suspended 
conscription in Ireland in hopes that the Irish 
would become " Moderates." This is not normal 
British policy or British sanity. I am, indeed, 
not the first by many to observe that the Britisher 
in Ireland, or treating of Ireland, loses his toler- 
ance, his patience, and sometimes his balance, and 
often becomes either a despot, or a weakling, or 
(if he stays long enough) a radical Sinn Feiner. 

The disease, however, is an Irish disease, and 
it is in Ireland that it must be cured. In Ulster 
it is constitutional and will probably yield only to 
operation, or atrophy of the obstructing parts. 
Ulster is relatively happy, and rightly so ; for, no 
matter how reactionary in policy, she has earned 
self-respect. She was useful in the war, which is 
certainly more than can be said without reserva- 
tion of the rest of Ireland. She is making money. 
And furthermore, her excessive desire to let the 
future take care of itself is less punished in this 
world than any other abnormality. Except in 



THE IRISH MIND 71 

times of revolution or rapid change, it runs with 
the wheels of ordinary living, and often directs 
them. 

But the malady in Southern Ireland is more dan- 
gerous and more sharply affected by the difficulties 
of the present. In some respects this Ireland is, I 
think, the unhappiest country in all this unhappy 
world. Others — Serbia, Roumania, Belgium — 
are infinitely more miserable, but they have not 
unhappy souls. The chief reason is that all her 
emotions of patriotism, hate, love, desire for ac- 
tion, are suppressed. I do not mean suppressed 
in the sense of being put down by force, like sedi- 
tious meetings, rebellious organizations, or scur- 
rilous newspapers. I mean suppressed by circum- 
stance and the conflict of the emotions themselves. 

The history of Ireland up to the last century 
has, of course, been one long tale of suppression in 
every sense the word can bear; but I am not re- 
ferring to inherited maladies, although no one can 
deal intelligently with Ireland who fails to take 
into account the reaction of her past upon a people 
vividly, abnormally conscious of it. I speak 
rather of the immediate suppressions of the pres- 
ent. Patriotism, for example, in Ireland, even 
among the bitterest Sinn Feiners, is a mixed brew 
of fierce love for Ireland with enthusiasm for the 
cause of the Allies ; and when their distrust of Eng- 



72 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

land blocks the way of sympathy with democracy, 
the result is a choked utterance and hysterical ac- 
tions. Hate for England is an honest, though not 
an admirable sentiment in Ireland, but even that 
gets no free outlet, for whatever England may 
have been in the past or may intend in the future, 
it is clear even to the most impassioned intellect 
that she has been fighting an avowed tyrant. And 
it is evident to more thoughtful observers that the 
anger hurled at liberal-minded, present-day Eng- 
land should often be reserved for Ulster, or a wing 
of the Tory party, or for mere unfortunate cir- 
cumstance. Love for Ireland turns to gall daily 
as the Irish factions wrangle and backbite and 
forget, not only the larger issues of the war, but 
even the welfare of Ireland. Suppressed desire for 
action is the keenest torment of all. It has al- 
ways been characteristic of Irishmen to spend 
their energies freely wherever feeling ran high. 
They have been in all wars everywhere among the 
white races, and in politics wherever a man speaking 
English could vote. They have always loved ac- 
tion more than the fruits of action ; and yet in our 
war — the greatest of enterprises — they stood 
aside or entered with troubled hearts. They went 
about their business (and few Southern Irishmen 
care fundamentally for business) while the rest of 
the world dropped prose for rough poetry and 



THE IRISH MIND 73 

emotional sluggishness for intense activity. As a 
result, minds are fevered ; they became like mis- 
chievous boys kept indoors on a rainy day. Sup- 
pression is always dangerous. When windows are 
shut, the house grows sour and moldy. 

But this suppression as one sees it in Ireland is 
perhaps also only a symptom. The real malady 
of the Irish state results from deeper causes, and 
is of the tragic sort of which great drama is made. 
Irish literature is solemn with its note. Irish 
brawls attain a dignity because of it, which we of 
the outer world admit by the attention we give 
them, but are at a loss to understand. In Ireland, 
the age-long, universal conflict between realist and 
idealist fights its sharpest and least conclusive bat- 
tles. In Ireland, this conflict in philosophies of 
living, like everything else, is abnormal, and its 
exaggeration may explain abnormality in other 
directions and may be the ultimate cause of her 
unfortunate suppressions. 

You cannot bring twelve men together anywhere 
in the world without feeling their division into 
tough and tender-minded, into those who are in- 
terested in facts and those others whose minds are 
stirred chiefly by ideas and emotions. And the 
tough are usually too tough, the tender too tender, 
and conflict between them is inevitable. So it is 
in Ireland, where a South which, in spite of its 



74 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

shrewdness, is predominantly idealist and " ten- 
der-minded " faces an Ulster and a landed aristoc- 
racy which, in spite of its sentimental obstinacy 
in religion and economics, is realist and " practi- 
cal." And there is this added circumstance, that 
it is " tough-minded " realists in England who 
have usually governed or tried to govern the Irish 
idealists. Even Spenser became a realist when he 
turned from Faeryland to write of the Irish about 
him. 

Barring the Ulster party, some of the Southern 
Unionists, and the hierarchy of the Roman Catho- 
lic Church, Ireland is the most hopelessly idealistic 
of modern nations. Life proceeds from idea to 
emotion, not from fact to fact, and happiness de- 
pends upon a state of mind, not upon welfare of 
body. Talk proceeds in Dublin with fiery light- 
ness because the speaker for the time breathes and 
lives in the ideas which form and reform as he 
speaks. In the country the peasants are rich in 
humor, joy, and sorrow in huts that an American 
" dago " would despise. Ideas, principles, emo- 
tions, which with us seldom see the light, are the 
worn coin of Irish currency. All pockets are full 
of them, and on their exchange the business of life 
is based. You are poor without them, wealthy 
with them, even if in poverty and distress. It is 
the rich and facile idealism that Dr. Johnson could 



THE IRISH MIND 75 

never understand in Goldsmith which we love and 
condemn and misunderstand in the Irish today. 

In its upper ranges, this Irish idealism is a de- 
sire for spirituality, for poetry, for beauty of 
thought and feeling, and so is in sharpest conflict 
with our prosaic industrial civilization. This is 
the idealism of the Irish literary movement and of 
the fine minds among the Sinn Feiners. It is " un- 
practical " only in its tendency to go around 
facts instead of over them. In its lower ranges, 
this idealism manifests itself as a desire for joy 
and " easiness " of living, and so is opposed to cur- 
rent conceptions of efficiency, industr}', and prog- 
ress for the sake of getting on. It may be due 
to climate, or to race, or to circumstance, but un- 
doubtedly it is there. We as a nation, and England 
as a nation, want an orderly, progressive, produc- 
tive state. The Irish wish a happy one, which 
might conceivably be disorderly, unprogressive, 
and just productive enough to keep the citizens 
going; and almost certainly would not be efficient 
according to our ideas of efficiency. Grattan's 
Home Rule Ireland was a scene of wild disorders, 
yet all testimony goes to prove that it was rela- 
tively a happy time for Ireland, when Irishmen, in 
the midst of corruption and conflict, were better 
satisfied and more productive than before or since. 

This same too logical idealism makes trouble 



76 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

in international affairs. All Nationalist Ireland 
warmed to President Wilson's declaration of the 
rights of small peoples and a rule of justice. His 
program, with all its implications, was better 
understood there than even in America. But 
when it came to supporting the Alliance which 
alone could make it effective, principle encountered 
fact, and the Irishman became indecisive. Senti- 
ment for Irish self-determination collided with the 
rough fact that he must fight for England in order 
to win the right to it. Ireland became sullen, un- 
happy, a liability, not an asset, in the world- 
struggle for better international government. 

Facts, indeed, elude them. " If England," I 
said to a conservative Sinn Feiner, " is beaten in 
this war, as you believe she will be, the burden of 
fighting off Germany will fall crushingly upon 
France and America." — " If England is beaten, 
and France and America must carry on the war," 
he replied, " there'll be no men but only old women 
left in Ireland." " What good will your handful 
of soldiers do us then? " was the inevitable answer. 

It is the refinement of these ideals into a national 
program which gives Sinn Fein its strength. 
Otherwise it would be less than Bolshevist, for it 
would be inspired merely by hate, poverty, and the 
desire for power. " I do not understand Sinn 
Fein," said one of the best known of the National- 



THE IRISH MIND 77 

ist M. P.'s. " It is not a party ; it is an emotion, 
or a dissipation." That is precisely true. The 
Sinn Fein party is after ends not means ; and its 
ends are Irish self-respect, a sense of national be- 
ing, the right to live and think and act in an Irish 
way. The means — no one seems to have thought 
out the means .in terms of a possible Ireland in an 
existing world-empire ; and hence they run all the 
way from peaceful penetration to open rebellion. 
The strength of the Ulster party is its realism, 
and its position is exactly opposite. Here the 
means are all codified and can be put into statis- 
tics : so much prosperity to be protected from 
Southern inefficiency, so many determined Prot- 
estants afraid of Roman Catholic domination. 
But its ends are the maintenance of a status quo 
which has not allowed a really peaceful moment to 
Ireland for hundreds of years. This is idealism 
with a vengeance, the acute sense of the needs of 
the present which keeps men sane and also makes 
them dangerous in an age that is changing its 
garments. Extreme realists like Sir Edward Car- 
son, stiff-necked and efficient, extreme idealists like 
Pearse, the educational reformer, who rebelled in 
order to advertise the danger of neglecting Ire- 
land, are in inevitable conflict with a hopeful set- 
tlement as well as with each other. Thus a cleav- 
age in temperament runs throughout Ireland, and 



78 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

between Ireland and those Scotch and Welsh and 
English who, by the logic of circumstance, are set 
to govern an " intractable " people. 

Personally, I think that there will be no final 
solution of the Irish problem in our time ; because 
I believe that Ireland is one of the world's volca- 
noes, where the hidden fire of human grievance will 
always break out until the cooling of the Irish 
temperament crusts over her hot emotions. The 
" practical " man will always oppose the man 
whose ideals are emotional, as long as there are 
black and white in the world ; and in Ireland they 
are purer bred in their respective temperaments 
than elsewhere. Yet evil conditions have enor- 
mously aggravated, if they have not caused, this 
conflict. 

And there is a middle party in Ireland, whose 
remedies may save her from ruin. Sir Horace 
Plunkett, or someone of his quality, is its pre- 
destined leader. It will stand for the economic 
independence of Ireland and a policy which will 
make it possible for her to prosper without extend- 
ing the unlovable factory system into regions bet- 
ter suited for agriculture ; and it will point to a 
half-million farmers who already have won their 
way out of poverty by such a program. It will 
be a party of conciliation between Catholics and 
Protestants. It will favor a separate state or 



THE IRISH MIND 79 

states for Ulster, on the American model, but keep 
her bound to Ireland, where she belongs first by 
trade-relations, and second by the religious and 
racial affinities of her little-heard-of Nationalist 
constituencies. It will advocate Home Rule, of 
course ; but a status that at present will of neces- 
sity be less independent than Canada's or Austra- 
lia's. For Ireland, internationally regarded, is 
now England's back-door, and, until the world is 
surely made safer, will remain so. 

Against such a policy, dreamers among the Sinn 
Fein and Tories in Ulster will irrevocably struggle, 
and the battle will last beyond our generation. If 
only a moderate government can be kept in the 
saddle, one hopes that the battle will last, and keep 
Ireland so busy and so interesting to Irishmen 
that the rest of the world may be permitted to 
profit by her genius without being distracted by 
her woes. I am not of the opinion of those whose 
heaven on earth is a stretch of fat prairie upon 
which all men are equally prosperous, think alike, 
work alike, agree in everything as their cattle 
agree, and die like their crops, leaving nothing but 
wealth behind them. There must be some patches 
of irritation left on the earth's surface, or we shall 
all decline into sluggish mediocrity ; and Ireland 
is bound to be one of them. We cannot make a 
plodding and sensible community — a Holland or 



80 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

a Pennsylvania — out of a national personality 
which, whether by harsh circumstance or native 
tendency, is now part genius, part fanatic, part 
hard-headed materialist. We have room, indeed, 
for a turbulent Ireland, if only for the by-prod- 
ucts, the sparks of wit and poetry and idealist 
anger shooting worldwide and kindling. But an 
Ireland with a grievance, an Ireland forced into 
dependency, with the faults of a dependent, an Ire- 
land spreading the infection of prejudice and hate 
— that is a different matter. 

My conclusion then is, that it is a waste of en- 
ergy for Americans to bewail Ireland or to con- 
demn her; to support Home Rule or the status 
quo; to argue for dominion government or stern 
repression, until they better understand the inner 
nature of the Irish mind and the conflict that is 
waging. After that, they will still violently dis- 
agree upon the responsibility for the present sit- 
uation and upon the means of curing it, but at least 
they will not beat the air. 

It is not loss but gain to feel the powerful fas- 
cination of Ireland. I would rather talk in Dub- 
lin than elsewhere, save in the Elysian Fields ; I 
would rather walk in the Dargle or on Antrim 
moors than anywhere except in my own New Eng- 
land ; I would rather live, if life were to be all ex- 
citement and spiritual conflict, in Ireland than in 



THE IRISH MIND 81 

any country of the world ; I would rather be with 
an Irishman in a trench than with a Prussian in 
heaven. But if Ireland ceases to be a pricking in 
the side of civilization; if she becomes a country 
where a man can be native and yet keep his temper ; 
if from the joy of living near beautiful mountains, 
in a country greener than spring in America, in a 
society rich with humor and easily pleased with the 
daily business of living, is to be abstracted the 
pathos of physical misery, the bitterness of con- 
flict and suppression, it will be because the Irish 
mind finds stable levels and can accept and apply 
practical cures and suggestions. We must dimly 
understand that mind, or we, only less than Eng- 
land, will pay a price. 

The Prussian program is said to have been to 
drive out the Irish and colonize the island with 
Saxons and Bavarians. They were willing to gov- 
ern Ireland, but not the Irish. What she really 
needs is a free fight, legally arranged for, umpired 
but not interfered with — a continuous perform- 
ance in which every Irishman can join without fear 
of being jailed by a timorous England. Weapons 
cannot be allowed, although many think they would 
be the more merciful arbiters. Tie hands and feet 
if you will — in other words make the struggle 
constitutional, — but permit no peace without vic- 
tory and no appeal to England or America. Not 



82 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

until they have fought it out, will the Irish mind 
be cured and realist and idealist compromise in 
Ireland. And compromise, self-determined, is the 
only hope for a stable Irish government. 



IV 

ON THE SENSE OF RACE 

Americans discovered the sense of race, with a 
start, somewhere in the latter end of 1914, and are 
not likely to be allowed to forget it in our time. 
The success of the nation we had been making here 
for some centuries had gone to our heads perhaps, 
and made us forget how little immigration or edu- 
cation or such accidents affect the subconscious 
self which is the real man. We did not know that 
when our ancestors intermarried they crossed the 
wires down which the strong current of racial in- 
stinct had been flowing, and entailed upon us a 
heavy responsibility. 

I remember an Irish girl in the slum streets of 
Belfast ; a black shawl over her black hair, eyes of 
corn flower blue, rosy blood pulsing under her 
pallor, every curve of her, every look of her breath- 
ing race. She did not have to think; she did not 
have to feel ; she was all Irish. 

And I remember a captain's wife of the enduring 
English type of the eighteenth century. There 
was a solidity in her graceful beauty that denied 
the word. Her face was flowerlike, but it was a 
tulip, not an airier flower. There was a plenitude 
of material for the making of it. The lines were 
firm, the curves long and firmly swung. Hers was 

83 



84 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

a perfected type, unlike our American beauty 
which is the fruit of a happy climate and instincts 
freely moving. Personality she doubtless had of 
her own, and a mind of her own making ; but with- 
out them she would have eased the eye of the stran- 
ger : there was such a peaceful conciliation among 
her elements, as if through long ages they had 
learned to live and move together in a racial pat- 
tern. One felt that she had been bred to fit and 
adorn her world. 

And I remember a little Gascon poilu, dancing 
while his leave-train waited at the station of Ver- 
sailles. With a roguish eye cocked at us, he flung 
himself into the rhythm, while some one piped from 
the nearest carriage, then stopped posing with 
head flung back, and poured libation to all the gods 
with a stream of wine squirted from his canteen in 
a crimson arc into his opened mouth. The gesture 
was inimitably Latin. It was as much a part of 
him as his quick eye or his explosive French. 

We have lost all that in America, and it will be 
centuries, perhaps, before we regain it. Our 
mixed bloods beat together, and keep a constant 
tension which helps to determine the nervous pitch 
of our lives. We have mixed many virtues, mixed 
many vices, mixed tendencies and reactions. As 
a result we are the most tolerant of people, but a 
little sketchy in our type. The American, in fact, 
is not made, but making ; he is synthesis on a scale 
never before attempted, and needs time for the ex- 
periment to reach its consummation. 

The war has made him conscious of his racial 
heterogeneity. It has turned the X-ray upon his 



ON THE SENSE OF RACE 85 

interior processes and revealed a metamorphosis 
not yet complete. He has become vividly aware of 
being a new racial creation, and unduly self-con- 
scious of the details. Hence every British sailor 
who, rolling homeward, asked how fast the troops 
were coming over, every school child of France who 
ran black-frocked down the garden to wave a 
flag and cry "Vive L'Amerique," pleased him, made 
him feel surer that there had been marriage in his 
blood. He stepped out more confidently ; repeated 
E Pluribus Unum with a proud and thankful heart. 
Some of this doubt, some of this confidence, some 
of this concern that America should be truly 
American enter into the essays of this book. 



INNOCENTS ABROAD 

Even before the war Americans were curious as 
to what other nations thought of them, and so I 
make no apology for beginning what I have to 
write with a pertinent conversation in which Mr. 
H. G. Wells and Mr. Arnold Bennett took part. 

" Unless you are forewarned by experience," 
said Mr. Wells, " you underestimate the American 
in the first ten minutes of conversation. Then 
you begin to understand. He has the enormous 
advantage of being elemental and unsophisticated. 
He is a breath of fresh air. Europe needs him." 

" We are * Innocents Abroad ' again? " I sug- 
gested ; and Mr. Wells and Mr. Bennett agreed. 

Is it true? Are we so naive, are we " simple "? 
We do not so describe ourselves at home. But if 
to be elemental and unsophisticated is merely the 
state of being young, Mr. Wells is probably right. 
Nothing in Europe, not even the French child, is so 
young as the American Army. I have seen them 
on transports subdued by the endless horizon and 
the grim unreality of the striped and blotched 
ships of the convoy. I have seen them lost and a 
little homesick in tangled London, and in Paris 
" jollying " one another over the hats of an admir- 

86 



INNOCENTS ABROAD 87 

ing populace. I have caught the distinctive spring 
of their march ahead on dusty roads behind the 
British front ; passed village after village of what 
was once French France bubbling over with their 
hearty figures ; noted the sharp profiles of Ameri- 
cans on guard at twilight by the entrance of ruined 
towns. Among troops, only the Australians 
looked as young as the Americans. The poilus 
might have been their fathers — many of them, 
indeed, were old enough to be, — but it was not 
age, it was experience, that made the difference. 
They looked tired ; and so, no doubt, did the Ger- 
mans. Our men were fresh physically and fresh 
mentally. They had the vigor and eagerness of 
youth. 

It was not the physical freshness, which must 
have passed after six months in the field, but this 
mental freshness of the Americans that was the 
new factor for war in Europe. I watched a French 
general as, surrounded by his staff, he decorated 
three American aviators with the Croix de Guerre, 
while an American and a French regiment stood at 
attention. The band of drums, fifes, and brass 
had just finished " The Marseillaise," the baton 
had waved for " The Star-Spangled Banner," when 
a sudden command hushed the musicians and split 
wide the ranks. Then down a long lane of soldiers 
six Nieuports roared, taking the air, to rise and 



88 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

turn and shoot one after the other northward 
where the Germans had crossed the line. You 
could see the eyes of our boys sparkle and their 
cheeks flush. The French held steady. What 
was one alerte more to those dark little fellows with 
their long coats and their slender bayonets? They 
were workers at a trade, skilful, untiring, unmoved. 
Youth had gone out of them. 

Again, one night it was my privilege to go to a 
dangerous trench where men from my own State 
and my own town were holding a position that had 
been " rushed " only a little while before, had been 
retaken, and might at any moment see the shock 
troops once more coming over and the barrage 
again begin. It was just dawn as we stole down 
a road the enemy were watching; the first bird- 
songs were ominous of growing light. It was too 
dark to see the sentinel in his shell-pit until his 
bayonet stopped us ; light enough to catch a glim- 
mer from the line of gray, expectant faces of the 
men who held the trench. It was a battle-scene as 
the dawn came on, machine-guns trained at each 
bay, nests of grenades ready for hurling, signal- 
flares still rising from the German lines, and in the 
bottom of the trench dark figures of men, dog- 
tired from their watch, rolled in the water and the 
slime. 

It would have made an effective lithograph, but 



INNOCENTS ABROAD 89 

the picture would have been misleading; for these 
were neither desperate heroes nor hardened vet- 
erans. They were boys, a little nervous, a little 
tense with excitement, content that day was ap- 
proaching, but eager that something should hap- 
pen ; talking of breakfast and cursing the mosqui- 
toes, but thinking most of the real push that was 
coming. 

The contrast with the fine poilus in the quiet 
trenches beyond Verdun was striking. " Bonjour, 
mon fits" said our old colonel to the first be- 
medaled breast we encountered in the somnolence 
of the front line at noon. " How goes it? " 

" Bien, bien, mon colonel. One habituates one- 
self after a while to this quiet life." 

That is the attitude of the professional, neither 
desiring trouble nor moved by it. It was the 
spirit of the Tommies I saw on Vimy Ridge, joking 
in their dugouts to escape the weariness of a war 
where the}^ were ready to hold on forever, but could 
take no joy. It was very different from the eager 
expectancy of the Americans, with tomorrow al- 
ways in their minds. And is not that almost a 
definition of youth? French and British alike 
were thanking Heaven that our army was young 
in years and youthful in mind and in hope. If we 
were unsophisticated in warfare, let us be proud 
of it. 



90 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

It was not only, however, by our army's spirit 
of youth that we Americans showed ourselves ele- 
mental and unsophisticated when over-seas. This 
inrush of eagerness into France, carrying 
strength, optimism, and a hope in retirement with 
it, was a new thing that only those who swung 
the circle of the long front line and ran down the 
spreading arteries toward the sea could fitly ap- 
preciate. What fools, after all, we were to sup- 
pose that dead things from America — food, guns, 
money — might be more important in a crisis than 
the courage, force, and enthusiasm that come with 
men! But this eager youth was no more signifi- 
cant than the instinctive simplicity — a simplicity 
both unsophisticated and elemental — which 
Americans abroad displayed in this war. 

I spent, by chance, some informal hours in a 
single day at two G. H. Q.'s with British generals 
and their staffs. What struck me in their talk 
confirmed many lesser impressions. It was of the 
mind of " Fritz " that they spoke, of how he 
thought and how he acted, talk full of respect for 
a resourceful, if unscrupulous adversary, inspired 
with the spirit of good sportsmanship and an in- 
timate study of man. And there was constant 
question of the last British " show," the strong and 
the weak, especially the weak, points of the at- 
tack or defense, as if it had been a foot-ball match 



INNOCENTS ABROAD 91 

instead of a death-struggle. On another occasion 
I crossed the torn hill of Douamont with a group 
of French officers who quite forgot their visitors 
in the niceties of technical argument over positions 
lost and won there. The Americans in France 
were not like that. Their view was narrower 
than the British and less expert than the 
French. Without British coolness and French 
strategy we might easily have wrecked ourselves in 
this war. But the American, nevertheless, went 
instinctively to what may, after all, be the heart of 
the military problem. He was absorbed in the 
" business " of warfare — construction, transpor- 
tation, organization. His imagination moved by 
leaps to vast enterprises for a year after tomor- 
row, and his energy, all steam up, came puffing 
after. What was happening on the remainder of 
the front only occasionally concerned him. In- 
stinctively he seemed to feel that modern war was 
a business, to be so conducted, to be so ended, and 
that let happen what might in Paris or Flanders or 
Mesopotamia, his prescription was " to get to 
business " first of all. Therefore he shut his mind 
to military speculation, and met his problem with 
a single mind. He was sometimes disappointed, 
skilful strategy occasionally wrecked his hopeful 
labors half completed ; but at least he acted not on 
theor}', but upon the facts as they were flung at 
his head in France. 



92 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

Yet this same soldier did, by European stand- 
ards, speculate most wildly on questions of war 
aims and world readjustments after the war. An 
English " Tommy " was blank when you asked him 
what would happen when Germany was defeated, 
a French poilu would shrug his shoulders ; but it 
was a poor-spirited "doughboy " who had no the- 
ory as to the remolding of powers and principali- 
ties. America, indeed, was the one nation, always 
excepting Germany, that committed itself in this 
already sufficiently difficult war to a reconstruc- 
tion of the world. And it is this, I think, that the 
Europeans chiefly have in mind when they call us 
" elemental " and, in irritable moments, " inno- 
cent." It is the American in world politics that 
they mean, from President Wilson down to the 
casual dinner-guest who in the midst of conversa- 
tion as to what the Swede intend, and what the 
French, blandly states that Europe must of course 
be reorganized according to a system entirely new. 
Our world policy is just as instinctive as our ob- 
session with business. 

Even the greatest among us are naive as we con- 
front European diplomacy and European en- 
tanglements. This is our strength — a strength 
as great as the vigor of our youth. The instinct 
and the will for vast political rearrangements are 
anesthetized in the European bourgeois — anes- 



INNOCENTS ABROAD 93 

thetized by custom and fatigue. They are to be 
found, of course, in outstanding persons, more so 
perhaps than at home, and also in organized bodies 
such as constitute the extreme left of every Euro- 
pean legislature. Their programs are sufficiently 
radical, as we well know; but John Smith, the 
draper's assistant, and Gaspard Le Fevre, the 
huissier, are too aware of the social fabric in which 
they live and work to dream easily of a different 
future. They lack the free-moving imagination 
of the Kansan or Oregonian, who, for all his ma- 
terial practicality, has seen and felt a continent 
shaped to his uses and old laws stretched to fit new 
needs. They lack most of all the experience of 
the melting-pot, antagonistic races forgetting 
their antagonisms in the possession of relative 
political and economic freedom, intermarrying in- 
stead of preparing to fight, exchanging, though 
slowly, racial prejudice for national pride. Amer- 
ica is just entering, I suppose, upon her greatest 
problems, and yet we believe, at least, that we can 
teach the world one fact : federation of races and 
sovereignties, both political and economical, is 
possible, has been accomplished. The United 
States of Civilization, if it comes, will certainly not 
be an imitation of our republic, but our faith in 
such a divine, far-off event springs from " the 
great American experiment " itself. And we have 



94 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

with us the free-thinking Canadians, New Zea- 
landers, Australians, who already, according to re- 
liable testimony, have broken up the political iner- 
tia of the British with whom they have mingled at 
the front. 

All this is in the sub-consciousness of the 
American abroad, and makes him seem naive to 
the critical and " elemental " to the friendly, 
among the Allies. Sometimes it is very far 
within. No one puts speculation as to the im- 
mediate future so definitely aside as the Amer- 
ican organizer in France ! no one can go so 
whole-heartedly after the " first objective " and 
let strategy take care of itself. That, as I 
have said, is one of our contributions to the 
war. But if we talk politics at all in Europe, it 
is the politics of the future, not of the past. We 
refuse to be bound by the " lessons of history," 
even when we know them, which is not often the 
case. We insist upon regarding the Balkans as 
potential Louisianas or New Mexicos, upon dis- 
cussing Trieste in terms of St. Louis and the open 
waters of the Mississippi, upon believing that the 
Germans of Germany are only Milwaukee Ger- 
mans, after all, controlled of late by a Teutonized 
Tammany Hall. 

All this is very naive, of course, and very inno- 
cent, and the diplomat of the old European brand 



INNOCENTS ABROAD 95 

endeavors not to be sarcastic as he states the man- 
ifold and documented objections — unchanging 
human nature, commercial rivalries, pride of sov- 
ereignty, and the rest. But the light-hearted 
American is not silenced. 

" I believe in a different future because yours 
is impossible ; your alternative implies a continua- 
tion of armaments and war to the brink, or beyond 
it, of degeneration. It is better, but not much 
better, than the domination of German Kultur. 
You counsel black pessimism ; but why be pessi- 
mistic until we have made a push with optimism? 
The world after the war will be what we make it, 
not what it was." 

Alas ! it is far easier to be pessimistic than opti- 
mistic, even in 1919. It is easy to urge the Amer- 
ican program for the rights of all peoples, for self- 
development within bounds laid down by the wel- 
fare of all ; but it is hard to keep up the mood of 
youth in solitary thought. To plan a world for 
1930 that will be better than 1913, better even 
than the present, requires an act of faith. Never- 
theless, one cannot take part in such conversa- 
tions without feeling the crude, fresh air of which 
Wells spoke blowing freely. And there are sev- 
eral circumstances of great importance which must 
be highly considered before the platform upon 
which America entered the war is condemned as a 



96 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

naive and shallow idealism. For it may be wise 
and not foolish to be naive, to be elemental, in this 
age of the world. 

Note first, that among all the " war aims " as 
expressed from time to time by the chief belliger- 
ents, only three looked toward the future. The 
expressed and authorized aims of Great Britain, 
except (an important exception) in so far as they 
echo our own, looked toward the righting of 
wrongs and the perpetuation of justice as justice 
was understood in 1914. The expressed aims of 
France were identical. Russia — what is left of 
Russia under the Bolshevik regime — dealt en- 
tirely in " futures," as they say on the stock- 
exchange, but the abundant idealism in her cer- 
tificates has little security behind it. Russia has 
mortgaged her present to a future this generation 
can scarcely hope to touch. As for Germany, her 
aims, as the dominant party expressed them, were 
certainly forward-looking, but like the famous 
dachshund that sought the tail he had long since 
left behind him, it was a pax Romana, of a kind 
gone, one hopes, forever that she sought; and in 
this future we refused with all our will and 
strength to play a part. There remained the 
" Wilson program," indefinite, impossible of imme- 
diate realization, involving readjustments each 
more difficult than problems which hitherto have 



INNOCENTS ABROAD 97 

been solvable only by war, but containing prin- 
ciples of international settlement on the basis of 
national rights that most men think to be sound, 
even though faith is partial and full realization 
improbable for our times. It seemed naive pre- 
cisely because it was elemental. In politics it may 
prove to have been one of the greatest, and per- 
haps the last effort, of that historical Renaissance 
which created modern civilization by substituting 
a creative hope of the future for an ardent sub- 
servience to the past. 

The second and more obvious circumstance was 
very clear to an observer who detached himself for 
a while from the tumultuous enthusiasm of early 
war-time in his native land. It was that no com- 
mon war aim but this united the American people ; 
that no other war aim had been given leadership 
that was powerful, distinctive, and our own. Bel- 
gium shocked us, the Lusitania enraged us, the 
world ambitions of the German empire stiffened 
our necks. We fought against all these things. 
But America, instinctively suspicious of European 
entanglements (bred, in fact, on the " Farewell 
Address " of Washington), instinctively averse to 
the bankrupt scheme of the balance of powers — 
America was moved to war because by 1917 it was 
only by war that we could maintain our ideals of 
decent living. It was " put up or shut up," as the 



98 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

old phrase goes, and we " put up." President Wil- 
son expressed, as no one in Europe, the instinctive 
will of a nation. 

I have written " as no one in Europe," and this 
is the third important circumstance that makes 
the naivete of America something more than 
charming innocence. Germany we may leave out 
of the argument ; although much can now be said 
of her leanings ; but I dare to answer with some 
confidence for Great Britain and France. The 
" breath of fresh air " sweeps through them also, 
and is preferred by a majority to their own tradi- 
tional policies. The " American lead " in interna- 
tional politics is better recognized, better sup- 
ported by a probable majority in each country 
than any leadership of their own from 1914 until 
today. Eighty-five per cent of the population of 
France, I was told by an acute observer, himself a 
Frenchman in a post where accurate and wide ob- 
servation was possible, support the " Wilson pro- 
gram " with all its implications. 

As for Great Britain, there are groups in open 
or concealed opposition, and there are many, as 
everywhere, who are ignorant of all issues ; but a 
definite majority could be polled for the principles 
— I do not say the details — of the " American 
idea " of what to do after the war. The most im- 
portant document in international politics issued 



INNOCENTS ABROAD] 99 

in England since 1914 is no single speech, or all 
the speeches, of the prime ministers, but the plat- 
form of the united labor parties as regards inter- 
national settlement. And this is in close agree- 
ment with the principles which our leadership has 
advanced, which most of us support, and which 
well nigh all of us, including those who dislike 
being led or who fear Presidential autocracy, 
instinctively crave. Even the Southern Irish, who 
differ from the English on every other conceivable 
point, agree with them that President Wilson is 
the political leader of the English-speaking world. 
All this explains why the governments and the 
press of the Allies speak to us as one might, at 
commencement, address high-spirited boys, untried 
idealists, who hold, nevertheless, the keys to the 
future. It was only a little while ago that Firmin 
Roz published a book in Paris which endeavored to 
prove to French incredulity that there was more 
idealism than materialism in America. And now, 
whether you take your evidence from the " Fi- 
garo," the "Temps," or the "Petit Parisien," 
from the mouth of Clemenceau or Bergson or Tar- 
dhu, the approach is always the same. It is an 
efficient and practical nation they address, who 
nevertheless wills peace among nations, non-ag- 
gression, and an order where strength of heart and 
of mind, beauty of life, and fineness of spirit shall 



100 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

have as great a price as might of arm and the 
power to exploit. And Great Britain speaks not 
otherwise. 

We are not quite like that. We are not so 
nobly minded, nor so innocent as just now they 
wish to believe ; we are not so altruistic, if in- 
deed it be altruism to desire the only world solu- 
tion that can save us from turmoil in the next gen- 
eration. Nor are we free from the passions of 
crude revenge, the desires for feverish activity, 
the liking for the rewards, pecuniary and social, of 
combat, which accompany war among all nations. 
Some of us are militaristic, some of us are profi- 
teers, man} 7 of us fought chiefly for the love of it. 
The Western European races and their offshoots 
do not differ profoundly one from another. Never- 
theless, what a man is thought to be he sometimes 
is, and often becomes ; and what a man thinks him- 
self to be is the most important thing about him. 
Europe believes and wants us to be idealistic. We 
have committed ourselves to a program of practi- 
cal idealism. That just now is the most important 
political factor in the international situation. 

It does not take much sagacity to see that there 
are two crises in this world conflict, one for victory 
in war, the other for success in peace. Idealism 
is needed for both if we are to win through. 
Through the first crisis we have already passed. 



INNOCENTS ABROAD 101 

The prestige of the German military leaders has 
been broken. Germany as a whole has been made 
to feel, and therefore believe, that a policy of world 
domination by force does not pay. It was not 
necessary, fortunately, to take Berlin in order to 
prove by our own exertions that the German Army 
could not impose its will. In this our youthful 
vigor and our business sense counted heavily. But 
other factors counted. As a writer in the " West- 
minster Gazette " said in 1918, the chief charac- 
teristic of the fourth year of war was fatigue, a 
joyless performance of duty for which there was 
no cure but hope; not hope of a meaningless vic- 
tory, which would be only a prelude to further 
conflicts where what had been saved or won would 
assuredly be lost, and victor and vanquished 
tumble together into the breakdown of civiliza- 
tion, but the hope which came from constructive 
ideas for the future, firmly grasped. I have heard 
military experts say again and again that military 
effectiveness is a matter of morale almost exclu- 
sively. And as the morale of the men in the 
trenches depended upon dry feet and full stomachs, 
so surely did the morale of the nation of which 
they were a part depend upon moral enthusiasm. 
We did not go on through the Argonne to destroy 
Germany or to get back a strip of land rendered 
desert in the getting. There were larger hopes 
than these in the bitter cup. 



102 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

The other crisis will come now that our morale 
has proved itself stronger than the Germans'. It 
will test us more deeply than the first, for success 
or failure will depend upon whether, as a nation, 
we can make good our idealism. Whoever thinks 
that this, in comparison with " winning the war," 
is easy, deludes himself. The greatest struggles 
of this epoch are to be social and political, not mil- 
itary, and this will be one of them. In order to 
carry out the principles we have affirmed, we may 
have to support policies directly counter to the 
cherished ambitions of some of our Allies. We 
may have to withhold our hands and the hands of 
others from punishments richly deserved by an of- 
fending enemy. We shall certainly be forced to 
cultivate detachment from prejudice and greed. 
And with equal certainty, America, in many re- 
spects the most conservative of the great nations, 
must be willing to adopt economic policies of an 
international character and in violent opposition 
to our protectionist, individualistic tradition. 
Without such an exercise of self-control and self- 
development, all talk of world federation and the 
prolongation of peace is moonshine or bluff. 

I am not afraid of wreck, if reconstruction fol- 
lows. I am not afraid of the results of this war 
pursued as it was to its rightful end. Human 
nature is more enduring than we thought, and it is 



INNOCENTS ABROAD 103 

good that we should prove it. The stoical mothers 
of England, the French children I have seen play- 
ing in the ruins of their cottage with rags bound 
round their wounded heads, the gray-headed poilus 
still cheerful after four years of danger and hard- 
ship and exile — these things are good if good 
come of them. But to trust alone to man's up- 
rightness under misery, to trust alone to military 
" preparedness " after the sermons writ large all 
over Europe, is a counsel of desperation. It is as 
absurd as our old comfortable belief that war as a 
danger could safely be forgotten ; as absurd as our 
delusion that we had only to go about our peaceful 
business in disregard of the rest of the world; as 
wild a counsel as absolute non-resistance. 

" In time of peace prepare for war." We must 
learn that old dictum, and add to it, " in time of 
war prepare for peace." Is it naive to seek with 
slow and hopeful perseverance an alternative to 
the wreck of states? Is it "mere idealism" to 
plan that nations should hang together instead of 
separately? If so, thank God that America seems 
to be young and innocent enough to lead in the at- 
tempt ! 



ON MORALE 

A number of years ago Professor Lounsbury 
wrote a chapter to prove that a language improved 
or retrograded with the growth or the retrogres- 
sion of the nation that spoke it. No artificial 
preservative would help the tongue if the race 
were decaying; neither slang nor colloquialism 
injure it if the speakers were increasing in vigor 
and civilization. At first glance the same thing 
seems true of morale — a virtue of which we have 
heard much since 1914. Morale depends upon the 
collective virtues of a race. When they weaken, 
morale weakens. When some of them — bravery, 
industry, self-confidence — collapse, sooner or 
later morale collapses also. This was the history 
of Germany in the autumn of 1918. 

But there is an important difference between 
morale and language, and one well worth noting 
for the precarious future. Only a dumb nation 
could fail to transmit its virtues in speech ; but it 
is not difficult to imagine a nation of individuals 
strong in excellent qualities, which nevertheless 
would lack morale. China perhaps is such a 
nation. This is no paradox. The private vir- 
tues become morale only when they become public 
virtues also. 

104 



ON MORALE 105 

One of the lessons that practical politics and 
the experiences of war time both teach, is that no 
man is known until he is estimated in both his 
private and his public capacity ; by his character 
and by his acts as an individual ; by his policy and 
by his influence in the state. We have all known 
admirable political " bosses " who nevertheless dis- 
tinctly did not stiffen the morale of the life of their 
cities. And there have been many men of the best 
brains, the finest courage, the highest organizing 
ability, in Europe and out of it in the past five 
years, whose influence upon the morale of the na- 
tions has been distinctly bad. It would be easy to 
name them. 

The reverse is also true, where the great figure 
who symbolizes and strengthens the desires of a race 
lacks the private capacities which alone can enable 
him to bring about their accomplishment. Lord 
Kitchener seems to have been such a figure. One 
might say that for a little while this " organizer 
of victory " was the morale of England. He 
could not organize victory. The task was too 
great for him ; although as a symbol of hope, as 
morale incarnate, he accomplished as much as 
could be demanded of a single man. 

It is the lack of public virtues — what might be 
called the Chinese danger — that America needs 
chiefly to consider. Our individual powers were 
high, our national morale low before the spring of 
1917. The wires transmitting the energy of pri- 
vate virtue into public service were in bad condi- 
tion. Some had broken ; there never had been 
enough of them; many were short-circuited. Let 



106 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

us confess now how thankful we were to see the 
enormous force of American private life pour into 
government service when we entered the war. New 
wires went up daily ; leaks were closed ; the home 
dynamos doubled speed ; the great machine re- 
sponded. But I have an uncomfortable feeling, 
which many share, that the great renewal of pub- 
lic-spiritedness of 1917 and 1918 partook of some 
of the characteristics of a rush order. Too much 
of it was in the form of a temporary expedient, 
easy to tear out, which will come down of its own 
weight if it is not made permanent. The habit of 
public service is not yet formed in the United 
States. Unless we take heed, our admirable mo- 
rale will become like our great exposition buildings 
the year after the show — paint-flecked, rickety, 
unstable. 

Moral earnestness, such earnestness as led us 
into the war, and kept our morale high, is the 
best asset in the character of the American people, 
better even than their energy. If our moral ear- 
nestness can remain patriotic in peace time we can 
be assured of American morale. Then it will no 
longer be necessary to consider nervously the ex- 
ample of the Chinese business man who runs his 
business admirably and cares nothing for his coun- 
try or the welfare of his race. 



SPES UNICA 

I have never seen the little village of Seicheprey 
by daylight. By sunlight, and before April of 
1918, it may have been one of those communities of 
rose-and-gray houses that cling like lichens to the 
slopes of the hills of Lorraine ; but as we stole 
toward it, single file, in the gray of before dawn, 
it was only a pile of obscure and tumbled ruin over 
which soared the flares of the German line. I 
should not have known I was entering a village had 
not my eye caught the dim form of a shattered 
human figure hung aloft by the roadside. It was 
a broken Christ with drooping head, on a broken 
cross. Above the crown of thorns, just visible to 
straining eyes, " Spes Unica " was carved in the 
stone — Spes Unica, Christ, the only hope. 

A little later we had traversed the ruins, viewed 
the sunrise down a dangerous open slope, and were 
in the tense excitement of the front-line trenches, 
where wallowing shells and rifle-crackling ended 
speculation. But again and again it has come 
back to me, as like sights to many, the broken 
107 



108 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

Christ, alone in the dead and ruined village, pro- 
claimed by ancient worshipers so confidently, the 
sole hope of all the world. 

Two weeks later, indeed, I had cause to think 
again of that hopeless cross. Great Bertha had 
aroused us early in Paris with her " pooras," un- 
pleasantly near and abominably frequent. By 
noon, when I left for a mission in central France, 
we knew that the May offensive had begun. At 
nine, as the clear twilight of the plains of Beauce 
suffused in amethyst the gray town of Chartres 
and the soaring spires of the cathedral, I fol- 
lowed a stream of suppliants through the royal 
porch. 

It was dusk in the lower spaces of the great 
church, but sunset in the vaults above, where from 
the blazing windows over the clerestory austere 
figures of saints and patriarchs looked down in 
radiance, and the glorious windows of the west 
front burned sapphire in the gloom. A boy's 
voice lifted, chanting in the mass. The shrine of 
the Madonna of the Column pricked into the ob- 
scurity its hundred points of light. The mass 
bell rang. Dusk became darkness. Then, silently 
as they had come, the worshipers streamed out- 
ward, and still the great windows burned and 
shone, dim, awful faces strong to save, jewel lights 
reflecting the glories of the thrones of Mary and of 



SPES UNICA 109 

Christ. Spes Unica. The hope of a nation in 
sorrow and in fear. 

But the hope of Chartres can never be to us what 
it was to the Middle Ages. It is not shattered, 
like the broken image of Christ, for Christianity 
does not shatter even in apparent ruin, but the 
great cathedral, with all it typifies, in which a na- 
tion, singing its " Miserere " or " Te Deum," freed 
souls from sorrow and found all its doubts and 
yearnings answered, belongs to the thirteenth and 
not to the twentieth century. What was reality 
has become a symbol, powerful for those kneeling 
women on the evening of the great offensive, com- 
forting for many, but answering not half of the 
problems driven upon us by the complexities of 
modern life. When Joan of Arc saved France 
they sang " Te Deum " in Chartres and went their 
ways. We, too, sang " Te Deum " when the Ger- 
mans crossed the line, and then returned to our 
troubled world, troubled unquestionably by those 
same diseases of the soul that Aquinas understood ; 
troubled also by a hundred things not in his phi- 
losophy, and feverish with splendid energies be- 
yond the wisdom of the thirteenth century to con- 
trol. There must be some universality of aroused 
feeling and liberated thought which can be to us 
what the cathedral was to France. We must have 
some substitute for that medieval faith whose mon- 



110 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

uments, some, like the crucifix, brutally shattered, 
some still fair, the American soldier saw on every 
fighting-line, by each rest-camp and landing-stage 
in Flanders or in France. Is there a common 
faith to-day that expresses the moral energies and 
spiritual desires of an awkward world? 

I believe that there is, but, whatever may be the 
answer, we have our own cathedral to raise, and 
all the inspiration and hope that we can draw from 
what still remains true for us of medieval Cathol- 
icism will be not too much for our heartening. 
When one considers what questions, moral, mate- 
rial, and spiritual, have been raised by the war and 
must be satisfied — duties to the state, duties to- 
ward backward territories, international morality, 
race jealousies, the elevation and education of the 
poor, sex adjustments — the edifice seems more 
likely to be an office-building than a cathedral ! 
However, we must at it. The Germans have been 
beaten soundly ; our own ideals must be saved not 
only from destruction by them but also from cor- 
ruption by ourselves. And that is the foundation 
only. They begged of you in France not to talk 
of the war lasting three years more, or two, even. 
They would endure, but it was easier not to look 
forward into a distressing future. "Say that it will 
end in the spring, and, when spring comes, if neces- 
sary we shall go on." They asked you in America 



SPES UNICA 111 

to talk only of beating the Germans ; but let us be 
courageous enough to realize that our work has 
been only well begun now that the Germans are 
beaten. We have still the edifice of a new world 
order and world belief to raise, and the greatest 
share of a grave responsibility is going to fall upon 
America. 

I do not believe that Americans have more than 
courageously guessed at the importance of our in- 
tervention in European affairs, and the load under 
which we have thrust our strong but innocent 
shoulders. The war, of course, would have 
ended, and ended, at the least, unhappily, save for 
our sudden millions. We turned the scale for the 
Allies ; but there the significance of our stride from 
isolation into the center of the European stage 
only began. Great Britain is the only historical 
parallel. In spite of Treitschke's jealous denials, 
historians agree that Great Britain did substan- 
tially save Europe from French domination in the 
Napoleonic period ; and it is certain that she 
emerged from 1815 richer than any other country, 
more powerful, with prestige and authority upon 
all shores washed by the sea. And, on the whole, 
Great Britain in the nineteenth century discharged 
her world obligations honorably, and with less 
material selfishness than might have been pre- 
dicted. She began that principle of trusteeship 



112 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

for the backward and the barbarous which, if it 
becomes international, will enormously reduce the 
probability of future wars. Nevertheless, Great 
Britain's position in 1815 was less dominating 
than ours, now that the war is won, and less re- 
sponsible. For we have emerged with control of 
the economic and military balance of power, not 
of Europe, but of a highly organized world. We 
are the richest nation; we are, as far as effective 
action is concerned, the most populous nation ; we 
are the one nation in the world which entered the 
war with a definite program to make not America, 
or England, or Europe, but the world, a safe and 
decent place to live in. 

Returning to America after seven months in 
Europe, I found this country fully alive to the ex- 
igencies of war. But I discovered (perhaps the 
fault was mine) only the vaguest realization of the 
decades of arduous leadership ahead of us. Have 
our schools and universities learned that unless 
they train leaders in reconstruction, in social prob- 
lems, in political management, and world economy, 
our " bluff " of guiding the world toward a 
durable peace will be " called," and called quickly? 
Have our business men realized that for a gener- 
ation at least the private interests of business must 
be subordinated not merely to the state, but also 
to the welfare of the world, unless, indeed, we pro- 



SPES UNICA 113 

pose to let the disciplined commerce of Germany 
(which will survive her armies) wreck the program 
of international good will in which fate has made 
us leaders? For if the commercial interests of 
Middle Europe and the East must choose between 
efficient German organization and selfish and con- 
flicting trade policies among the English-speaking 
nations, they will not hesitate long. Are we pre- 
pared to counter Bolshevikism by education and 
social justice? 

I cannot discover — and this is the root of the 
whole matter — more than a faint recognition that 
unless American character in this generation is as 
great as American responsibility and opportunity, 
one of the most stupendous disappointments in his- 
tory lies ahead. In this respect we are, tempera- 
mentally, the exact opposite of the Germans. 
They, on the basis of industrial and intellectual 
efficiency of a high order, easily conceived them- 
selves a superior people, destined to dominate and 
civilize the world. But their moral basis was too 
narrow, their civilization too mechanical, their 
arrogance too overweening, their personal supe- 
riority relative, not absolute. For they were as 
far below the French and English in some respects 
as ahead of them in others. The Roman and the 
Greek were absolutely superior to the barbarians 
they conquered. Not so the German, who earned 



114 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

barbarian for his surname before his Kultur had 
begun to demonstrate its unquestioned power. 

We Americans are not, I fear, unboastful. But 
when the Germans rushed in, proclaiming them- 
selves super-men, we are content with the sudden 
parade of our resources and do not always hear 
the call to be individually greater than our adver- 
saries. And yet the events of 1914-19 have flung 
us into an arena where we find ourselves champions 
not only of our own superiority, but of the best 
ideals of all the world. " E Pluribus Unum " is 
our motto ; and yet we have fought for the many 
against one ; for a good diversity against a tyran- 
nical uniformity ; for a many-colored Europe 
against a German gray ; for freedom in develop- 
ment against tyranny in the worst of all senses, 
since it was a prospective tyranny of mind over 
mind. 

And all that this means for the ordinary, every- 
day, unheroic American we do not yet seem to un- 
derstand. Two millions of men in France, billions 
of Liberty Loans, the energies of the nation di- 
rected to war, was a heartening answer for a first 
call, but this was only the beginning. The real 
strain will come upon our brains, our morale, and, 
most of all, our character. Russia was less great 
than her reputation, and her collapse has been in 
measure with the greatness of her lost opportunity. 
It must not be so with us. 



SPES UNICA 115 

To underestimate the difficulties ahead, to say 
(as did Russia) that all we have to do is to keep 
drawing upon our unlimited resources, may be 
medicine for the weak, but is perilously near to 
criminal folly. To croak calamity is also foolish. 
Arthur Henderson, the English labor leader, when 
he was in Russia in Kerensky's day, found, so he 
told me, that the members of the capitalist group 
one and all were reading histories of the French 
Revolution. Support Kerensky, he urged them. 
What is the use? they said. It is all in this his- 
tory. His moderate government will fail inevi- 
tably and give place to a radicalism so bad that 
in three weeks Russia will overthrow it and we shall 
come to power again. What will happen to you 
in those three weeks? he asked them. But rather 
than speculate upon the answer they (and the En- 
tente diplomats) preferred to trust to historical 
analogy. Kerensky fell some months before his 
time, the soldiers left the trenches, and the great 
war, which was nearly over, took a new and Ger- 
man impetus. 

Nor is there a historical analogy that is of real 
value in our case. If we fail, it will not be because 
of present incapacities. Up to 1918 the Ameri- 
cans, so all Europe judges, have shown strength 
in themselves, leadership in their President, and 
energy in their organization surpassed by none. 



116 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

If we fail, it will be because we cannot rise higher, 
as we must, to meet the tide of difficulties, because 
we cannot increase our moral and mental strength 
in a world that will be sick of nerve strain and dis- 
illusionment. What is our Spes Unica, our hope? 
I believe it is to be found, and found in abun- 
dance, in the new moral earnestness for which the 
war is directly responsible; and with every desire 
not to preach, and after unusual opportunities to 
see how vital was the need of food, guns, money, 
and material organization of every kind if we in- 
tended to win the war, I say that morale, which for 
us is moral earnestness, was the great hope even in 
1918 and the first practical necessity. One found 
such earnestness in France ; one found it in Great 
Britain roused to dogged intensity ; one found it in 
Ireland in curious fanatic extremity. Raemaekers, 
the cartoonist, told me at the front one night that 
he hoped Holland would join us " to save her moral 
being." But here in America it is backed by sim- 
plicity of character, a consciousness of unexhausted 
strength, and by such energy as the world has 
scarcely seen since the days of the Normans. It 
is a vague and irregular religion in comparison 
with that perfect cult of the cathedral, which was 
all things to all men, and had an answer for every 
problem in this world or the next. It is less com- 
plete, and also less limited, for it is an expression 



SPES UNICA 117 

of an age whose possibilities are almost unlimited. 
Christianity is at the base of it, but it is a broader 
interpretation of Christianity than St. Paul gave, 
or the Middle Ages could apply. 

Moral earnestness, and not the mere need of 
self-defense, carried England through the dark 
spring of 1918. I talked in that year with Eng- 
lish political leaders of every party. Some com- 
manded my whole-hearted respect ; others were 
clearly time-servers, driven by events ; some repre- 
sented policies I distrust ; and yet I found in one 
and all an unexpected conviction that what Eng- 
land did infinitely mattered, and an impressive wil- 
lingness to admit responsibilities beyond their own 
little group, to America, even to the next genera- 
tion in Germany. One of the storm-centers of 
English public opinion was Lord Northcliffe. He 
was accused by some of having no principle, and 
no policies not subject to change on short notice; 
he was believed by many to exercise an irrespon- 
sible and unscrupulous influence upon public opin- 
ion by means of his controlled press. And yet his 
worst enemies admitted that he wanted only one 
thing, and that was to win the war. In other 
words, even if a demagogue and a none too reliable 
leader, he was morally earnest. And the list, 
both of strong and weak, could have been indefi- 
nitely extended. 



118 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

In America it is clear that we feel this moral 
earnestness even more intensely because more 
simply, more naively, if you will, than the older 
nations. Every other explanation of our en- 
trance into the war as a united nation breaks down 
on analysis. We thought in 1916 (let us be hon- 
est now and say it) that the days of '61, when, 
North and South, we were willing to fight for a 
principle, had gone forever. We thought, some 
of us, that if America went into the war it would 
be upon a wave of frenzied patriotism, exactly 
equivalent in nature, if not in cause, to that dis- 
eased nationalism which carried Germany through 
Belgium in 1914. We thought, many of us, that 
if we stayed out of the war it would be because we 
knew on which side our bread was buttered, and 
that as the butter grew thicker our neutrality 
would increase. The outcome ruined the reputa- 
tion of many cynical prophets. German threats 
and German submarines were inciting incidents 
merely. The President, voicing the time spirit, 
quickened our moral earnestness, made us think 
and feel for once internationally, and the rest fol- 
lowed in natural sequence. 

It is easier, however, to begin than to carry on ; 
it is always easier to fight than to organize the 
fighting, than to profit from its results, than to 
reconstruct after destruction. Are we earnest 



SPES UNICA 119 

enough to live up to our obligations? None can 
answer that question. But the reply depends 
upon factors that will bear discussion. Have we 
intelligence enough? Are we whole-hearted? 
Moral earnestness is like optimism ; it is little good 
unless it makes good. 

Unintelligent seemed to many of us the hysteri- 
cal appeals to think only of military problems 
until the war was won, as if we were so weak that 
only one task could engage our energies at once. 
The incredible blunders of diplomacy made by the 
Allies in Russia and Eastern Europe are monu- 
ments to this kind of single-mindedness. The 
neglect of social unrest in Italy, which, save for the 
efforts of the American Red Cross, might have 
taken her out of the war; the feverish assertions 
in many American and some French and British 
papers that the working-man must be kept in his 
place, are sign-posts pointing ominously ahead. 
If we have not intelligence enough to realize that 
the industrial system of the world before the war 
was wrong and must be readjusted, our moral ear- 
nestness will never prevent economic disintegration 
or social revolution. England deserves great 
credit for her practical recognition of this grim 
but undoubted fact. Unintelligent, also, though 
earnest enough, often, indeed, immorally earnest, 
are the passionate attempts of leagues and associ- 



120 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

ations to begin the game of commercial grab again 
for ourselves alone ; and if camouflaged as revenge 
upon Germany, all the more dangerous to our mo- 
rale. We have seen before this the morally earnest 
man rooting out the unbeliever, so that he could 
possess his vine and fig-tree, and the portent has 
never been auspicious for a peaceful world, made 
fit for decent, fair-minded folk to live in. The 
" patriot " who calls upon us to forget that we 
fought for a clean and durable peace while we 
pledge ourselves to ruin our enemies after the war, 
is as dangerous as he is stupid. He urged us to 
drive a powerful enemy to desperation and thus to 
double the cost of our victory in money and life; 
he urges us now to arm with greed and vindictive- 
ness instead of a clean conscience, common sense, 
and an earnest conviction that more than our 
pocketbooks are to profit. It is true intelligence 
that distinguishes between this foolish fist-shaking 
and the steady, ruthless use of the economic 
weapon until we obtain our just and legitimate 
ends. 

But the greatest need of a nation suddenly 
toppled into world conflict and world responsibil- 
ity like ours, is whole-heartedness. Our sudden 
wave of earnestness made us approach whole- 
heartedness for the first time in generations ; and 
we shall have to stay so if we are to stay 



SPES UNICA 121 

earnest. Italy has suffered bitterly from a lack 
of this quality, socialist quarreling with social- 
ist, " Greater Italians " with non-annexationists. 
France, on the other hand, has achieved her mag- 
nificent morale by a whole-heartedness in the face 
of visible danger, the sound of guns, the bombs by 
night, the pitiful evacues streaming southward day 
by day. Our whole-heartedness, like England's, 
was of a different kind. It sprang from the moral 
imagination. We helped to ward off death-blows 
from others before we ourselves were more than 
buffeted. We toiled and suffered and were greater 
than ourselves, when we could have lived, for a 
while, very comfortably, and left it to our sons to 
square accounts with Germany and the world. It 
is going to be hard for Americans to carry on 
through the long series of adjustments into which 
the war is subsiding, unless their earnestness is 
whole-hearted. Straight backs and stiff upper 
lips are going to be needed quite as much as " hus- 
tlers," and organizers ; and an earnest, undivided 
public opinion most of all. 

It is by " gassing " public opinion that the pac- 
ifists, radical socialists, and conscientious objec- 
tors do the most harm. There is an uneasy feeling 
in England, and here also, I suspect, that the news- 
paper condemnation of pacifists as unclean and 
poisonous animals somehow misses the point. There 



122 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

are so many other animals far more poisonous and 
really unclean ; for when you stop saying " paci- 
fist " and begin to speak of John Brown, or Mary 
Smith, the individual often proves to be a person 
active in good services, not military, to the state, 
and likely to be a valuable citizen when we reach a 
durable peace ; while many noisy " patriots " are 
none too useful now, and likely to be still less so 
later. 

Nevertheless, the professional pacifist seemed 
wrong and dangerous to all of us who believed 
that the war had to be made conclusive. The 
most important charge against him was not that he 
believed the war should be ended by negotiation. 
There he might conceivably have been right, 
though the evidence was heavily on the other side. 
The most serious charge against the pacifist has 
the advantage of being susceptible of proof. He 
saps our moral earnestness by doubting its sincer- 
ity. He attacks whole-heartedness. 

Let me cite, as an illustration, a typical family 
which represented what one found often enough 
among pacifist and semi-pacifist groups in Eng- 
land, and, I have no doubt, in America also. The 
father was one of the most useful citizens in Great 
Britain. His business, which was the building of 
motor-trucks, was an essential industry, and was 
conducted with such regard for the new conditions 



SPES UNICA 123 

of labor that increase in wages and output, a bet- 
ter working environment, and reasonable profits 
were all secured. Furthermore, he had served with 
distinction on commissions that have rearranged 
throughout Great Britain the economic relations 
of employer and employed. He did not believe in 
war, but he supported this one as the lesser of two 
evils. Whether he would have fought if called 
upon I do not know, but his work at home was 
worth a regiment in the field. The oldest son had 
conscientious objections to taking life. He en- 
listed, however, in dangerous relief work on board 
the trawlers, was wounded, and returned to his 
service. The next son passed last year the age of 
enlistment. He shared the family distrust of war, 
but was all afire with the necessity of downing the 
Prussian menace by force, if no other way was 
open. He felt that his duty was to fight. The 
mother, a fine woman, of the seed of the martyrs, 
was an out-and-out conscientious objector. War 
she regarded as the prime evil. The attitude of 
her husband and older son she condemned ; when 
her younger son consented to fight, her heart was 
seared. At home she was active in good works 
for the refugee and the destitute alien, but she 
could not talk of the greater issues of the war with- 
out bitterness toward her family and a fanatic dis- 
trust of her countrymen. 



124 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

It was one of the ablest, most unselfish, most 
high-minded families in England, but its atmos- 
phere was disturbing. The younger son I was 
sorry for. His youthful enthusiasms were clouded. 
No course seemed to him entirely right. He was 
unhappy fighting; he would have been still more 
unhappy if he had refused to fight. The mother I 
criticize. Her moral earnestness was too narrow. 
In a struggle where every force for good in the 
nation was called upon, she denied the validity of 
righteous anger that employs the weapons of this 
world, and excluded as impure the splendid cour- 
age and devotion and sacrifice of the thousands 
who were giving their lives for what they believed 
to be a worthy cause. She had buried her talent. 

And this was the error of the pacifists in gen- 
eral. They should have been with us. We needed 
them more than many a mechanical invention which 
has been hailed as an ender of war. We needed 
their moral earnestness to keep us whole-hearted. 
But they refused to work with the world as it was ; 
they doubted all sincerity unless it was their own. 
Will they share our burdens now? Have they 
learned tolerance from the war? 

Many a crippled body and soul wounded or be- 
reaved must envy the perfect whole-heartedness of 
the religion of the cathedral, and many will rightly 
find solace there. But for us who are still un- 



SPES UNICA 125 

winged, and upon whom the plain duty of living up 
to our responsibilities after the war most heavily 
falls, there must be a more immediate and mundane 
hope. Is it possible, in the midst of such a flood 
of writing upon political and military devices to 
convince the dazed reader that our trust must be in 
intelligence and whole-heartedness, that these lie 
behind material agencies and are indispensable? 
If he will not believe it, then it is useless to present 
the Spes Unica of the shattered cross as a pathetic 
symbol of how much men have lost of their ancient 
sureties, and the moral earnestness of an aroused 
world as a single and invaluable hope. 

Our leaders and the fighters in the war were 
keenly aware of this elementary truth, although 
they confessed themselves in deed more often than 
in word. French politics and German diplomacy 
fluctuated with the morale of the people at home. 
Generalship, I heard a chief of staff at the front 
once say, is three-quarters a knowledge of the 
mood, the condition, and the character of your 
men. For a week I traveled the British front with 
a grizzled major of a Highland regiment, who had 
been in the game since 1914. We lunched one day 
with a mingled group of field and intelligence offi- 
cers, a Belgian on liaison work, and a visiting 
French captain. The talk, which was chiefly upon 
specialties beyond the range of war, made one fact 



126 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

evident — the world of civilian life was more inter- 
esting than ever before to these men. They were 
passionately desirous to get back, to " clean up 
the mess " there, to go on with their mounting, 
broken careers. 

" How do you stay so keen on your job here? " 
I asked the major afterward, " when you are more 
weary of war than they are at home? " 

He flushed a little, British fashion. " Have to 
clean up this mess, first," he answered. 

A week later a fine boy stood by his Nieuport 
on the American front, talking to me before a 
flight. 

" I don't think much of the danger," he said, 
" though I don't forget it. It's hard work getting 
the Hun. There isn't time to think of dying." 

Suppose they had not felt that way, what would 
all our inventions, our Liberty Loans, our supplies, 
have amounted to? Or, to carry it further, who 
would have invented, raised, and transmitted? 
Russia was rich. Russia, with all her weaknesses, 
had a sufficing economic system. Russia lost her 
whole-heartedness and collapsed like a balloon. I 
have seen the doubts, difficulties, strains, and abso- 
lute losses of war-time in Great Britain, Ireland, 
France, and the front. And if I am an optimist in- 
stead of a pessimist or a cynic as regards the fu- 
ture, it is because (if I may borrow a word usually 



SPES UNICA 127 

given to the enemy) I believe in the efficiency of the 
moral earnestness I have watched at work among 
our Allies and in America. We, especially, must 
keep ours earnest, keep it intelligent, keep it whole- 
hearted. 



VI 

ON THE UNCOMMON MAN 

It begins to be evident that we gave ourselves 
unnecessary concern over human nature. The 
war has brought forth courage, self-denial, de- 
votion, and the sterner moralities from all 
peoples like leaves in spring. Courage has not 
been taught, and self-denial has not been taught, 
and devotion to ideals has not been a subject for 
curricula ; the most backward and least admirable 
countries in this five years' struggle have poured 
them forth without preparation. The common 
man has done all that a romantic idealist 
could have asked of him, and often more. Mor- 
alists and politicians and philosophers can take 
him off their conscience for a while. He has 
made good. Education can do little for him 
except to make him uncommon. 

It is the uncommon man who has failed. He 
has succeeded best when he has thrown into the 
conflict those common virtues of courage, intel- 
ligence, self-sacrifice shared by millions. When 
he tried to meet an abnormal situation by un- 
common abilities he has failed in an appalling 
number of instances. He could not prevent the 
war. He could not end it quickly. He failed 
in emergencies where a sounder judgment, a 

128 



ON THE UNCOMMON MAN 129 

more expert knowledge, a richer background 
would have made the difference between suc- 
cess and failure. Extraordinary men — the 
Hoovers, the Wilsons, the Fochs, the Lloyd 
Georges — even (for a while) the Ludendorfs — 
succeeded ; but merely uncommon men failed. 

And the reason seems to be that there were not 
enough of them. When the crisis toppled over 
well-trained men, when as officers they were killed, 
or as executives or specialists they were worn out 
or outgrown, the supply began to fail. In Eng- 
land and France this was notable in 1918. Com- 
mon men, strong in the emotional qualities of 
human nature, were recruited to take their places, 
often successfully. But you cannot train a com- 
mon intellect to be uncommon in a fortnight. The 
fault, when there was fault, was not in the material, 
it was in education. 

The need for uncommon men will grow in the 
immediate future ; it cannot lessen. If we assume, 
as we well may, after this war, that the child of the 
masses has latent within him qualities of heroism, 
of nobility, of dogged persistency equal to the best 
and hitherto slighted ; if we believe, as we well may, 
that unless his heredity is vicious, much, at least, 
can be made of him ; perhaps we shall begin to 
educate with the conscious purpose of making all 
capable minds uncommon. The result would be 
interesting. Hitherto education for the masses 
has consisted largely of training the common 
people to be common ; and what we planned we got. 



K 



TANKS 

Many must by now have read the deservedly 
famous chapter in Butler's " Erewhon " on the 
peril of machines. The inhabitants of Erewhon 
lived happily without machinery, and why? Be- 
cause it became apparent to their philosophers 
that from intricate machinery to engines with con- 
sciousness and self-action was only a step. Ma- 
chines could already do many things better than 
could men; a little more development and they 
would begin to think for themselves. But if their 
mechanism became that ingenious, why could they 
not be made to breed and propagate ! Then the 
machines being stronger would control the men ! 
Frightened by this thought, the prudent Ere- 
whonians abolished machinery in its medieval 
period. 

Butler was obviously ironical; but the Tank 
comes near to bearing out his literal meaning. 
Are Tanks conscious? If you should meet one 
sauntering along a route nationale or sliding down 
a side hill for a drink of petrol, you would not 
swear to the contrary. Do Tanks think? Feel a 
Whippet twirl under your feet, right and left, as 

130 



TANKS 131 

she picks her road across trench bays, or watch a 
Mark V mount and jog the length of a train of 
flat cars until he finds one that suits him, and you 
can almost believe it. Do Tanks breed? Well, 
at least there are male Tanks and female Tanks, 
and to all appearances offspring seem quite as 
probable as with elephants. Have Tanks a sense 
of humor? Perhaps not, but like Falstaff they 
are a cause of humor in others. Five new Whip- 
pet Tanks, with their machine guns jammed, 
chased a fat German major down a long hill in 
France one morning in May, their eight miles 
an hour just equal to his perspiring best, while a 
regiment of Australians at the top collapsed in 
laughter and forgot to fire. I should like to ask 
that German (who may be still running) whether 
Tanks are mere machines. 

The Mark IV Tank is a slow and sullen dino- 
saur. Four miles an hour is his limit. Fre- 
quently, with sponsons taken off, and armament 
removed, he mounts a platform on his back and 
carries a sixty-pounder gun ; or hauls a sledge, like 
an ox team, to pull big howitzers over shell craters. 
The Mark V is the next step upward in evolution. 
He is good for five miles an hour, has made nine, 
and one man can drive him. " Him " is not ac- 
curate, for if his weapons are machine guns instead 
of two-inch cannon, " her " is the proper designa- 



132 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

tion. When I climbed down into the hot and 
whirring middle of a Mark V, heard the gears 
squeal and roar, and saw through the eye-slits the 
ground swinging under us, I knew how a steam 
roller might feel in a briar patch. Nothing could 
stop our many ton, hundred and fifty horse power. 
We came to a trench, swung up, so easily, and 
down with scarcely a quiver, and so on about our 
business. And if the trench had been wider? 
Why then, there are " tadpole tails " provided, 
which hook behind and serve for leverage. 

But the Mark V is a ponderous invention. It 
was with the Whippet that imagination touched 
the Tanks. The Whippet — so named I suppose 
from the speedy dog which chases rabbits to earth 
— is the pacing dromedary of Tankdom. She is 
light — only a few tons I should guess — and in- 
stead of accommodating man Jonah-like in her en- 
trails, carries a cab like a camel's hump, from 
which one can look, sometimes perpendicularly, be- 
hind. The Whippet has two engines, one for each 
of her paw series, and that accounts for her eccen- 
tric motion. As she runs her eight, ten, up to a 
conceivable twenty miles,* an hour, she squeals 
raucously. At a rock or a stump — both bad for 
Tanks, which can be " hung up " on their " bel- 
lies " — she whirls with unbelievable rapidity till 
your eyes are looking one way and your stomach 



TANKS 133 

another. Then she rumbles gaily over the field 
seeking for trees under twelve inches through to 
practise on, sees a trench, rises on her hind quar- 
ters, drops below sky-line with a teeth-shaking 
bump, grips the further bank, rolls up screaming, 
and charges off for more. 

A bank attracts her. She noses it until she finds 
an angle not quite, but almost perpendicular, and 
sticking her nails in the sod, worms up, while you 
cling to the machine-gun, and look at grass which 
is both back of and below you. And as she goes 
she spits oil, blows dust, and flattens the world 
behind her. If an enemy, you may escape her by 
lying on the bottom of a trench; you can smash 
her with a shell if you can catch her on the wing, 
which is not easy ; but the preferable place with a 
Whippet is on top. Never was devised a more 
dangerous, humorous, human engine of warfare 
than this. Indeed, it is not Tank tactics, which 
are not yet publishable, but Tank humanity, that 
is the subject of this writing. 

I was several times a guest at " Tanks," the 
name applied not only to the great repair station 
and depot, headquarters of the Tank Corps, but 
also to the quiet chateau with its admirable seven- 
teenth-century porch where the young general of 
Tanks (Orpen's picture shows his energy and 
power) and his active staff are quartered. Our 



134 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

talk ranged through and about and above Tank 
tactics and on into England and the psychology 
of the races at war ; but it came back and back to 
the raison d'etre of the Tank. " The business of 
the Tank," he said, " is to meet and master the 
machine-gun so that infantry can carry on fur- 
ther; and in this its use has but just begun. Its 
object is to save men." 

There you have it. Tanks are not simply de- 
structive machines, like rifles or howitzers, they are 
substitutes for men. And indeed, they are organ- 
ized like cavalrymen in brigades, sections, com- 
panies, each with so many Tanks. For all I know 
there may be Tank corporals and Tank sergeants, 
distinguished by chevrons painted on their spon- 
sons. I saw, in fact, wounded Tanks, bruised or 
broken at Cambrai and elsewhere, with ribs stove 
in, elbows shot away, or fractures over the eye- 
slits. Some were in shop-hospitals ; some in the 
convalescent-yard waiting to be repainted; some 
had been discharged as no longer fit for active 
service, and were crawling about with petrol ra- 
tions for the able-bodied. And most had names. 
You would never, of course, expect to call a Tank 
by a number, like a U-boat. Bucephalus, I re- 
member, was a particularly fit Mark V. Many of 
the older fellows, in addition, had messages painted 
or chalked on their sides by their friends, the 



TANKS 135 

" Tommies," as if in eager endeavor to enter into 
communication with a kindred spirit. " Go for 
'em, old girl ! " " On to Berlin ! " — and, more 
poetically, " Roll on, thou dark and deep blue 
monster, roll ! " 

A very curious relation subsists between the 
Tommy (or his equivalent, the poilu or the dough- 
boy) and the Tank. Humor — which was des- 
perately scarce in this war — has attached itself 
almost exclusively to him. Both have been ter- 
rible by all civilized standards, including their own, 
in action ; both have endured incredible punishment 
in defense; and yet both inspire the reflective ob- 
server with a humorous liking and a desire to 
laugh, even when death awaits or accompanies 
them. Why? An answer might conceivably be 
drawn from Bergson's essay on laughter. The 
Tommy is amusing because his whimsical humor in 
a situation that asks for seriousness is incongru- 
ous. The Tank is amusing because its ponderous 
imitation of life in actions of which life is inca- 
pable, such as walking over forests or into a hail of 
bullets, is also incongruous and so laughable. But 
the whole truth goes deeper, and there is a more 
fundamental similarity between the Tommy and 
the Tank that it would be well for us all to appre- 
hend. Both in a sense are machines ; neither is in 
his own control ; each is a mere irresponsible agent 



136 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

for a superior will, laboring dangerously at the 
word of command. 

When such humble agents of defense or offense 
belong to the enemy, it is interesting to note that 
in this war, irritation, anger, rage, have been 
aroused not so much against them as against the 
superior minds that control them. Perhaps this 
is because civilization is ageing and begins to see 
more clearly. We may loathe the U-boat pirate 
and all his ways, but our righteous anger is most 
mightily reserved for the men who first taught the 
philosophy which leads to spurlos sinkings, and 
then organized its terrible practice. Instinctively 
we feel that the brute is not so bad as the cynic 
who makes use of him. This is not unreasonable. 
Captured sailors from German submarines have 
told me that they seldom knew what was going on 
in the waters above or beyond them; and anyone 
who has been in a submarine can see how readily 
this may be true. I do not mean that they are 
left spotless thereby ; far from it ; but ultimate re- 
sponsibility belongs elsewhere. So even with the 
butchering by common soldiers in the invasion of 
Belgium. No sane man will ever try to excuse 
them ; yet the brains that worked out the policy of 
" frightfulness " are more truly blood-guilty than 
the frantic men who executed it. 

So again with those shameful German women 



TANKS 137 

who, by lamentable proof, have too often been wan- 
tonly cruel to the helpless wounded captured from 
their enemies. For it should be more generally 
known that they were not Red Cross nurses in our 
meaning of the Red Cross. The Red Cross among 
Germans is a stolen emblem. Their organization 
has never been intended to alleviate suffering 
wherever found. It was a department of the Ger- 
man army, as much so as the medical corps, whose 
first duty was not to the wounded, not even to the 
German wounded, but to the " effectives " on the 
way to the front. When this is known the action 
of the nurse who would not give a drink of water to 
a suffering Tommy becomes at least a comprehen- 
sible brutality ; and our indignation centers upon 
a government that so perverted the meaning of the 
symbol that represents Christianity in war. 

The same general tendency, but fortunately with 
very different accompaniments, was to be observed 
on our side of the Western front. It is worthy of 
curious note that among the Allies the men, with 
rare exceptions, were given unstinted praise; the 
officers, or the staff, or the politicians at home got 
what blame was going about. The " splendid 
British soldier," the " heroic poilu," and now "the 
magnificent Americans " — how well we know these 
phrases ; and, unlike most stereotypes of the press, 
experience at the front more and more convinced 



138 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

that they were true. There was humorous exag- 
geration in the Australians' comment, that they 
took their officers along for mascots ; and danger- 
ous exaggeration, for the bravest men are slaugh- 
tered uselessly without trained minds to conduct 
and plan for them. Nevertheless, the common 
soldiers of the Allied armies have unquestionably 
come nearer to the ideal standard of the modern 
warrior than the many kinds of experts set above 
them. Plain human nature was easier to coach 
successfully for this war than brains ; and when 
things went wrong, it was the directing mind that 
we accused of failure. 

Here lies perhaps the explanation of our curious 
attitude toward the Tommy and the Tank. There 
is something very fine and also a little pathetic in 
brave, unthinking manhood, sticking at it, getting 
wounded, getting killed, but sticking at it, and 
ready for orders after hardships incredible to 
home-keeping men. Patriotism helps the soldier 
of course, the backing of the crowd steadies him, 
fear or self-defense are strong motives — but 
whether he is fighting with a definite anger felt 
throughout his moral and physical being, or is in 
the war just because he couldn't keep out and fight- 
ing only to preserve his self-respect, he carries on 
month after month, year after year, as if he had 
been born for nothing else. A general's error, or 



TANKS 139 

the enemy's quick-seized opportunity, may slaugh- 
ter him by masses ; yet if he is triumphant his re- 
ward too, by the nature of things, can seldom be 
but in the mass. When this pawn of the world's 
game can joke in a gas mask and make faces at 
the shell which just misses his abri, we laugh ten- 
derly with him, feeling love and perhaps shame. 
For he cannot make war unaided, cannot win it 
without direction, cannot, it seems, stop when he 
is beaten ; he can only fight on. 

And now observe the Tank. It also presents 
the same spectacle of a good servant doing our 
will, driving through mud and steel, and always 
ready for the next objective until ruined and 
" scrapped " by the wayside. The Tank also, 
though like the Tommy it bears a name, is only an 
anonymous agent of G. H. Q. and the national 
leaders, and will get no individual credit. We 
shall always read, " the Tanks division success- 
fully prepared the way for attack," as we read 
" the Lancaster Yeomen," or the " 102d regiment 
of the Yankee Division performed feats of unex- 
ampled valor." And when, creaking and groan- 
ing, a Whippet whirls on her stomach to show how 
debonair and powerful she is in the face of im- 
minent danger, we laugh at her as we laugh at the 
poilu when he jokes. 

The truth must already be apparent. The Tank 



140 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

is our first real approach to the mechanical sol- 
dier — the soldier without blood to spill and nerves 
to tear, who can nevertheless perform the inevi- 
table business of physical collision which must 
come if human will set against human will finds no 
better means of settling the conflict. The Tank 
has no consciousness to extinguish once for all, 
no future to lose, for it is as worthless as a battle- 
ship except for war ; the Tank alone can meet the 
machine gun and triumph, like the armored knight 
who in the Middle Ages gathered the shafts to his 
bosom and conquered in spite of them. William 
James wrote of a moral substitute for war, hoping 
by hard service to the state to secure for man the 
splendid discipline, the self-sacrifice, the fighting 
emotion of war without its unhappy reactions. 
Here is a mechanical substitute for warring man. 
In the period of the Italian Renaissance warfare 
reached such a pitch of science that the mercenary 
generals who fought for Venice or Florence could 
sometimes calculate the probable outcome, and 
save their troops the hardships of battle. Then 
Charles the Eighth with his hordes of French ama- 
teurs marched into Italy, fought without regard 
to probabilities, and changed war from a science 
to a rough-and-tumble experiment. Are we com- 
ing to an age when mechanisms will be sent from 
our fortresses to fight it out under scientific con- 



TANKS 141 

trol, the best machines, best made, best handled, to 
win? War will scarcely be ended that way — 
not while there are modern Charles the Eighths to 
spoil the game by loosing some new fleet of super- 
airplanes upon hapless civilians behind the lines. 
But the Tank is a first step toward substituting 
steel for bodies in a war where muscles have given 
place to high explosives, eyes to range finders, ears 
to microphones, noses to gas signals, legs to petrol, 
and skulls to " tin helmets." 

It is hard not to be whimsical in mood when writ- 
ing of Tanks, and yet I do not desire to be whim- 
sical. Tanks were no joke for the Germans. 
Their own clumsy contrivance, built in imitation, 
proved how anxious and how unable they were to 
retort effectively in kind. And that we should be 
building machines to take the place of men is no 
mere romance of science or expedient of a warfare 
where " cannon fodder " has risen in price. For 
if the Tank takes the place of many common sol- 
diers, then many common soldiers need no longer 
stay common ! 

The Germans recognized this principle in their 
later methods of attack. Roughly speaking, and 
in exact accord with their idea of the value of life 
where the state and its ambitions are concerned, 
they divided their infantry into two sorts. There 
were the regiments of inferior material, true 



142 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

cannon fodder, which could be pushed in 
masses against the enemy, succeeding often by 
sheer momentum, in spite of frightful losses ; and 
there were the picked men, of " storm troop " 
grade, armed with machine guns, able to hold what 
was taken, and each worth a score of the rifle- 
armed rabble. This was the scheme of Prussian 
evolution toward super-war, a less humane and 
ultimately a less effective method than the British 
invention. Furthermore, a method which looked 
toward a Prussian future merely. For note that 
men and machines in Prussian eyes had the same 
value, or rather, that men by proper discipline 
could be made as valuable as machines. The 
Prussian mind conceived a battering-ram of ple- 
beian, second-rate flesh (preferably Social Demo- 
crats, unskilled laborers, and the like) which could 
be crushed in assault without material loss. The 
Western mind imagined the Tank, a super-Tommy 
without his precious vital spark. 

It is easy enough to see where the Prussian sys- 
tem, if it had escaped a thorough beating, would 
have led. It led toward the modern version of the 
slave state, where the masses are well fed, properly 
cared for, and, within definite limits, well educated, 
so that when the need arises they may be good ma- 
chines, not bad ones. Where our Tank idea 
points is not so clear, but it is none too early to be- 



TANKS 143 

gin to consider what it may mean for the peace 
with a threat of new wars, which is the best we can 
hope from the future. 

If it is possible — and who will deny it — that 
in future wars, if we permit them, machines will 
serve as infantry and cavalry ; that guns will be 
laid and fixed by mechanical means from some safe 
place in the rear; that submarines and monitors 
will operate by wave lengths sent from shore; if 
it is probable that the coming world, whether in 
war or in peace, will be as full of machinery, of 
appliances, electrical, chemical, mathematical, as 
the inside of a submarine, why then what shall we 
do with our Tommy in the meantime? Shall we 
keep him an automaton, whose humor, like the 
Tanks, is pathetic precisely because he does under- 
stand so little of the vast forces around him, forces 
as far as the moon beyond his control? Shall we 
make him more of a machine, or more of a man? 
For after the shaking-up this war has given him, 
neither he nor his children will stand still. 

If it is more of a man that we wish to make him, 
a man competent to control machinery because he 
understands it, and able to guide it because he 
can think out how and where and why it is to 
be used, then we must educate him. Not half- 
heartedly as we have done, but as the Greeks would 
have educated him, as seemingly they did educate 



144 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

even their slaves, by contact and practice with the 
best of the technical processes he will have to fol- 
low ; by absorption of the best ideas as to the rela- 
tion of his work to his life. The first means tech- 
nical education raised to an excellence which we 
have not yet given it, and broadened to cover all 
the processes necessary or useful for the preserva- 
tion of life. There will be less and less place for 
unskilled labor and unskilled fighters among civ- 
ilized men ; machines will be the unskilled laborers ; 
and if your common soldier of to-day is left tech- 
nically illiterate, he will sink to their level. 

Nothing, however, has been made clearer by this 
present conflict than that even in war the man with 
a narrowly specialized education may be a greater 
danger to the world than the most unskilled of 
peasants. The Prussians have pursued in their 
lower schools an education that has specialized for 
the conduct of a war by weapons, social and eco- 
nomic as well as technical and military. They have 
been better educated in this respect than any other 
race. And yet they did not know (neither leaders 
nor followers) that the invasion of Belgium would 
arouse immitigable waves of righteous anger and 
responsive force ; they did not understand the mind 
of the rest of civilization ; they did not know that 
technical efficiency is not a substitute for a knowl- 
edge of human nature. 

We cannot, it would be madness, give the worker 



TANKS 145 

and the soldier of the future a merely technical 
education. Give him power over the machine with- 
out wisdom to direct it — why that is precisely 
what is the matter with this poor world today ! 
It would be better to restrict to the minimum edu- 
cation for the masses — as I heard the manager of 
a famous but none too liberal manufacturing plant 
suggest recently — and so guarantee a supply of 
hewers of wood and drawers of water ! This would 
be the safer alternative. Jealousy, fear, the de- 
sire of domination, which, in Homer's day, led to 
blows between champions, and in Shakespeare's 
brought little armies to cut and slice at each other 
with the sword, now discharge terror and death, 
multiplied a hundred times by the power of science, 
upon millions, combatants and non-combatants 
alike. We as a community (and when I write of 
the common soldier I write of course of the com- 
munity) control ourselves a little better, but not 
much better than the Myrmidons or the Elizabeth- 
ans ; but when we lose our heads the results are out 
of all proportion. We have stolen the thunder- 
bolt of Zeus without becoming Zeus. 

Reluctantly one comes to a conclusion which has 
nothing novel about it except its present necessity. 
We must not only plan to give, but really give the 
common man what has been in the past an uncom- 
mon education. He must have in addition to 



146 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

technical facility the power to criticize his ex- 
perience; he must have that freedom of thought 
of which Pericles spoke to his Athenians, which 
makes men able to reflect and then go forward ; he 
must learn to see himself in his relation to his 
world. Briefly, the soldier must get what history, 
literature, social science, and philosophy can give 
him. This is no program of Utopia. It will be 
found — some conservatives may be surprised to 
learn — in the schemes for education in demobili- 
zation already drawn up and put in partial opera- 
tion by the military authorities of Great Britain, 
New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. It 
is implied in the remarkable work of the British 
Board of Education which supplied books free on 
any subject to prisoners of war. But the in- 
tensity of the need of a broader horizon for us all, 
and the vast difficulty of accomplishing one-half 
that must be done, can be expressed in no pro- 
gram, but only in a rebirth of our whole educa- 
tional system. 

And here lies the vast potential difference be- 
tween the man and the Tank. The personality we 
have lent those lumbering chariots — their humor, 
their perseverance, their implacable obstinacy in 
danger — is all borrowed of course, borrowed from 
their companions who with bayonets set run behind 
them. They can never be more manlike ; they can 



TANKS 147 

only be better machines, better armed, better pro- 
tected, more speedy, more effective in crushing 
ramparts and guns and men. And the more 
highly specialized they become for warfare, the 
further removed they must be from that agricul- 
tural ancestor who crawls in Texas or Louisiana, 
the more worthless for any purpose whatsoever 
save military offense. 

It is not so with the Tommy, the poilu, and the 
doughboy, those humorous fellows we speak of with 
a loving yet patronizing admiration, who hold 
nevertheless the future in their hands more surely 
than ever Caesar or Napoleon ; who are democracy 
and will control it. You can make a mechanical 
specialty of the common soldier also. You can 
train his mind to act with machine-like regularity 
in the execution of all orders, whether in peace or 
war, and you can put his body also in absolute con- 
trol ; you can, if you will, so great are the resources 
of the modern state, make him Prussian ; and what 
have you — a million machines which suffer, breed, 
and blindly destroy at the word of command! A 
million machines that will break against a truly 
intelligent nation. 

Or we may follow a different course. We may 
borrow and transform the great, though misused, 
discovery of the Prussian. For the Prussian has 
clearly proved that, by a well-planned, thoroughly 



148 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

conducted system of elementary education, a race 
may be bent from its course and directed along 
ways prepared for it toward a destiny which (in 
this instance) would surely have been attained if 
it had not countered the will of the world. We 
may borrow the discovery, not imitating the prac- 
tice, and give our democracy skill where they lack 
it, breadth where they need it, and that power over 
life which can be sustained, if not created, only by 
freely moving thought. We can devise no Utopia, 
but we can make such an effect upon our democ- 
racy by real education as no one before the ex- 
ample of Prussia would have dared to prophesy ; 
and it can be done in a generation. We can — 
thanks to the development of machinery — make 
the best soldiers that way — for the best soldier 
for modern war, so all agree, is the most intelli- 
gent. We can in such a fashion, and in no other — 
and this is by all odds the most important impli- 
cation — develop in a generation a community of 
able fighters whose group intelligence is great 
enough to substitute international law for war. 

Universal education! How curious to be still 
sounding that old slogan, whose cause, it seemed, 
had long ago been won. Won ! We have scarcely 
grappled with it. The means of education have 
hardly passed beyond the stage of classification. 
We are in the text-book stage still. Nine-tenths 



TANKS 149 

of our education remains in life itself, where it be- 
longs, but unorganized, unapplied, often dis- 
trusted by the high priests of school and col- 
lege. The Athenians of the fifth century with no 
schools at all did better than we do, with all our 
enormous mechanism. And the one-tenth that we 
have captured and codified in books and labora- 
tories has had the joy and the vigor and the per- 
sonality squeezed out of it, like a rubber sponge. 
War, as Thucydides said, educates by violence. 
Such violence has been necessary to prove to some 
of us, by the wasteful rigors of conflict, how little 
our education was related to life, and, what is even 
more important, how little our life was related to 
education. There is no limit to what we can do 
for the pliant, persistent human nature which this 
war has shown that the least intellectual among us 
may possess. 

We have but lightly grasped the means of edu- 
cation ; and we have but dimly seen its end. Is it 
not self-evident now, that the democracy which is 
to rule us must have the best instruction that it 
can take and that modern civilization offers? Is 
it possible any longer to think of genuine universal 
education merely as " a good thing," as philan- 
thropy, as an aid perhaps to good government? 
Is it not the only possible insurance against world 
disaster? Those who doubt have little knowledge 



150 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

of what is going on around and beneath them. 
Heaven knows we have cause enough now to realize 
the importance of the economic factor in its effect 
upon history. We have reason enough to take 
seriously the adjustment of population to food 
supply, and the flow and distribution of wealth. 
But in the readjustments of all questions affecting 
the feeding, the clothing, and the enriching of man, 
let us not lose sight of one salient principle : if no 
one can be wise long on an empty stomach, so also 
no one can travel far, even on a full stomach, with- 
out wisdom. We have invented machinery without 
learning to control it. Let us not invent (or suf- 
fer) new distributions of power without providing 
an effective education in its use and enjoyment. 

We devised the Tank and sent it upon its way re- 
joicing to the discomfiture of our enemies. It is 
harder to devise a new and improved man, but quite 
as possible. We cannot give him religion, which 
he clearly is seeking, we cannot give him a loving 
heart, we cannot give him courage if he does not 
possess it, we cannot give him strength of intel- 
lect, we cannot give him instinctive morality. But 
a well-trained mind, and well-trained muscles, and 
a fairly sound body we can give him in nine cases 
out of ten — even the Chinese coolies on the Brit- 
ish front have been taught to build complex ma- 
chinery ; and a sense of his place in the world, eco- 



TANKS 151 

nomic, social, ethical, historical we can give him; 
and also in some measure the power of independent 
thought. The object of the Tank and all me- 
chanical contrivances is to save life, to save life 
in order that in the future men shall be men and 
not machines. 



VII 
ON THE PERSONAL IN EDUCATION 

A flippant reviewer remarked upon " The Edu- 
cation of Henry Adams," that only a Bostonian 
would spend a lifetime in trying to discover how to 
educate himself for living. The criticism gives Bos- 
ton an undeserved singularity. In every age and 
every civilization, the most thoughtful men have 
been precisely the least dogmatic when they have 
tried to define education, and they have usually 
been far less certain in middle age than in youth. 

The difficulty is that the problems of education 
cannot be solved by the arithmetic that suffices for 
more material things. The study of literature 
may be useful in sweetening the mind and the study 
of mathematics in clearing it ; a course in engineer- 
ing may teach how to build bridges, and a course 
in law how to wreck railroads, or save them; but 
the sum of all that is taught to youth must be more 
than an addition of the formal subjects he is learn- 
ing. Whatever power or profession this course 
or that may teach, education as a whole must be 
for living. The boy has to learn how to live ; and 
unless he has learned he is not fully educated, no 
matter how much or how long he has studied. The 
greatest scholars, as Chaucer long ago remarked, 
are not always the wisest men. 
152 



ON THE PERSONAL LN EDUCATION 153 

This is the fatal realization that smites the " or- 
ganizer " (if organizers are ever smitten!) just 
as his scheme of studies for an ideal school or uni- 
versity is complete. His is a noble scheme, but 
when its simplicity is compared with the complex- 
ity of life, doubt enters. This, he may say, is the 
proper fashion of teaching law, but will this course 
make a good lawyer? These are the subjects that 
every college graduate should learn, but will this 
curriculum make a good college graduate? It is 
easier to make scholars than men. 

There is only one way out of the difficulty, and 
that is an uncertain and expensive one. You can- 
not put all education into text-books, but what 
cannot be extracted and codified you can present 
in its container — the educated man. You can 
ask a teacher to teach what he is able, and to be 
those things impossible to teach. By learning 
what a truly educated man is, and how he thinks, 
and sharing, or at least observing, his emotions, 
the student can derive by imitation or repulsion 
(either will do it) a balanced ration for his grow- 
ing mind, which never can be fed on facts alone, or 
theories, or anything that can be put into a college 
catalogue. But such teachers are hard to get, 
and they should be expensive. 

This is the defense of the personal relation (and 
of personality) in teaching. And it is the con- 
demnation of our wholesale methods of lecture and 
text-book and recitation in America. They sup- 
ply, it is true, the protein. But they leave the 
carbohydrates and the fats of life to chance pur- 
veying. This is why " the playing fields of Eton " 



154 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

and the " bowls " and " stadiums " of America 
have been successful in the limited but well-bal- 
anced and highly personal education they provide, 
while the classroom and study have so often failed 
in the broader and more important field of training 
the intellect to conquer life by understanding it. 



EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

Save military tactics, there was nothing more 
discussed in Europe last year than education. The 
English newspapers quoted from Milton : " The 
reforming of education is one of the greatest and 
noblest designs that can be thought on, for by the 
want thereof the nation perishes." Public speak- 
ers, whether they know it or not, spent more than 
half their energies on problems of instruction. If 
I were asked to state one thing that men from the 
front and behind the front said they had learned 
from the war, it would be the unsuspected and in- 
comparable importance of education. 

I do not mean education in any formal, text- 
book sense. At Aldershot it was a question of 
making soldiers. At Polder's End and Barrow-in- 
Furness, as one walked through row after row of 
mob-capped working-girls turning shells, the talk 
was of how they had been taught to work, and how 
the employers had been taught to teach and handle 
them. At Issoudun, it was education all day long 
in vrilles and loops and the co-operation of brain 
and eye in observation. On the New Zealand 
front I lunched within sound of a battery, and, 
155 



156 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

eager for stories of the enemy, listened to the gen- 
eral in command while he talked education, how 
that remarkable little island might get back 
trained men after the war. 

Everybody was either learning or teaching on 
the front. What was the rehearsal of an offensive 
but concrete education in tactics? The sanitary 
corps never made its rounds without teaching care 
of physique. Back and back again the conversa- 
tion came to the morale of the enemy, his training, 
bad and good ; how and why he worked harder than 
we did; how and why he had less independence of 
action, less judgment, less humanity; and the 
answer was always, education. A young general 
of the old army said at lunch one day : " I am a 
' mercenary soldier,' and therefore I can't believe, 
and don't, that war is bad for character; but I 
would not have military training for a whole na- 
tion, except in time of war." He need not have 
made concessions to the civilian present. Educa- 
tion for war-time as one heard it explained and 
speculated upon in the army was not much nar- 
rower than the reform of the human species, mak- 
ing them more intelligent, more adaptable, and 
more capable in all things as a prerequisite for 
waging successful war. 

In England, one-half of the serious discussions 
one hears I should classify under education. I 



EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 157 

precisely do not mean that London in war-time was 
like a teachers' association with its gabble of meth- 
ods, courses, and text-books. On the contrary, 
although exposed to " shop " of this nature by a 
university connection, I heard little talk of formal 
education, could arouse no interest in " the college 
curriculum after the war " and such favorite sub- 
jects, found it difficult to get a clear idea of just 
what the British school system had been like, such 
was the keenness to discuss not the bones, but the 
blood of education. And yet this was the period 
of the fight over Mr. Fisher's education bill, so 
hotly contested that even the war yielded front- 
page columns now and then in its favor. This was 
a time when you could stir any Britisher to talk 
— M. P., soldier, workman, country gentleman, 
superintendent, I tried them all — merely by the 
question, " What is going to happen in English 
education? " 

No wonder they are interested. Efficiency — 
and in March of 1918 England saw clearly that 
she must be efficient or starve — depends upon edu- 
cation. Propaganda — and half the writing done 
in England is propaganda — is a form of educa- 
tion. The next generation is decimated by the 
war, and what is left of it will have to make the 
greatest profit in the briefest time, from education. 
Germany had set the nations at one another's 



158 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

throats, and to thoughtful men there seems no 
way to prevent the thing from happening again 
except by better (and in Germany's case, com- 
pulsory) education. 

I am not (thank Heavens) writing a treatise on 
education after the war, for the excellent reason 
that neither I nor any one else knows the terms 
upon which it will be conducted. But one cannot 
come into active contact with hundreds whose ex- 
perience, often bitter, has brought them a new 
sense of values without at least an enrichment of 
opinion. And the effect upon most men who have 
taught for a living is to make them crack open 
every educational idea they possess to see whether 
it holds dust or moving life within it. England 
at large is profoundly dissatisfied with her educa- 
tion ; and she is right to be dissatisfied, for in some 
respects she was dragging far below the safety 
line. The crust is cracking everywhere, the dust 
is blowing away, new blood is throbbing. We 
shall soon be profoundly dissatisfied ; not with 
entire reason, for, after all, our success in the try- 
ing year of 1918 is a success for American educa- 
tion in school and out of it. But when we begin to 
realize that under stress a boy of twenty was being 
taught the very complex business of modern war 
in a quarter of the time we allotted to less difficult 
professions of peace, we are bound to be dissatis- 



EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 159 

fied also. We are bound to wonder whether we 
have not underestimated American capacity for 
learning, even when unstirred by a grave crisis. 
And when we thoroughly understand that propa- 
ganda (which is merely expert transmission of 
ideas) has turned the heart of nations, while our 
formal education in ideas, historical, philosophi- 
cal, or economic, has often sunk only skin deep, we 
are sure again to be dissatisfied. If we had edu- 
cated as well before this war as we educated for 
waging it, there might never have been one. If 
we educate as well after it there will never be an- 
other ; or, if there is, we shall win it. 

This is an essay and not a treatise, and I shall 
be more than content to say as simply and briefly 
as possible what the living heart of education seems 
to some of us ; what England has had, and has, 
that we have not ; what we have grasped that Eng- 
land is still seeking. If successful war is largely a 
question of national education, and a stable peace 
is also to depend upon education, then that co- 
operation which we all hope to see among English- 
speaking countries may serve us almost best 
through mutual education. 

There is, I am well aware, a prevalent belief that 
Great Britain has little to teach us in education. 
It is known that her lower schools are good, but 
probably no better than ours. It is known that 



160 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

her " public schools," of secondary grade, are won- 
derfully effective in " stamping " the boys that go 
through them, but narrow and rigid in what they 
teach ; that there is no wide-spread system of sec- 
ondary education for everybody such as our high 
schools afford. It is known that British univer- 
sities, while still famous for the men they produce, 
are irregular in their excellences, hampered by a 
medieval organization, and distinctly behind in 
many ranges of modern thought and investigation. 
This was known, and this is measurably true. The 
Fisher bill, which in effect establishes compulsory 
high schools that after seven years will keep boys 
and girls in school until eighteen, seems a step up 
to, not beyond, America ; and one hears of no radi- 
cal, far-sweeping changes proposed in the British 
universities. 

Why, then, in the stress of war and the ap- 
proach of reconstruction, should we be interested 
in British education? The answer is to be found 
in the war itself. Many nations have suffered 
more than Great Britain ; none of them has had to 
make such a universal right-about in thought, hab- 
its, purposes, desires, down to the last detail of 
daily life. I can think of only one among all my 
acquaintances under sixty years of age, in Eng- 
land, whose daily life has not been completely up- 
set and rebuilt since the war. And the leaders in 



EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 161 

this revolution have been in nine cases out of ten 
the products of the most British part of British 
education — Oxford and Cambridge, the public 
schools, the circles of the Workmen's Educational 
Association. We thought that our own college 
system was decadent until the war revealed what 
fine fellows it was sending, in spite of its faults, to 
a business world that was, perhaps, too self-cen- 
tered to appreciate them. And the education that 
sent forth the dead tens of thousands who led the 
way for England is not a failure. Neither has it 
succeeded because of its faults. 

The enduring strength of British education is 
its practical grasp of the principle that nothing 
matters half so much as the meeting of minds. 
There, for all our elaborate systems and doors 
open everywhere, Ave have been negligent. Its 
weakness is an exclusiveness, half purposeful, half 
due to exigency of circumstance. Here much is to 
be learned from America. 

I think that my first clue to the master idea of 
British education came from two Scotchmen, mu- 
nition-workers now, but one-time educational ex- 
perts, who simply would not talk about " the cur- 
riculum." It was not that they did not know ; of 
course they knew ; but every question aroused some 
problem in teaching or research that interested 
them far more than the typical schedule of the 

M 



162 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

British school. It was weeks before I succeeded in 
pinning down an authority to a statement of just 
what the British school did teach, and then I got 
it in printed form, and found that, when all had 
been said, what was taught depended chiefly upon 
what the school wanted — a scandalous situation, 
as any well-regulated American would testify. In 
Oxford, in Cambridge, in Manchester and Edin- 
burgh, in the London schools, and in the training- 
camps, in the commencing khaki university behind 
the lines, the same thing always happened. I came 
away from each investigation with a sense of hav- 
ing talked vitally on education and with few 
" facts " to put into my notes. It was all humor- 
ously different from many a school and college 
convention I have left in America with a bag 
leaking syllabi and prospectuses all the way home. 
There is a close connection, of course, between 
this British planlessness and the lack of theoretical 
science so evident in England at the beginning of 
the war and the inferiority of much technical 
training in Great Britain. These defects must be 
taken care of, but there is no need to pause for 
criticism. The bird I am after is of swifter wing. 
It is the secret that explains (for example) why a 
slack college with an eighteenth-century equipment 
could send men to the front, who, not at first, but 
in the long run, proved themselves the equals in 



EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 163 

most respects, and the superiors in some, to the far 
more efficiently trained Germans. It is the ex- 
planation of why British education, with all its 
faults, has really educated. 

The answer is simple enough, and I shall be 
merely reiterating in stating it, but this answer 
has a new significance in war-time, and especially 
for us. It explains, I think, why it is hard to in- 
terest the Englishman in problems of curriculum. 
Said the master of an Oxford college (we were 
talking of one of the " young men " of the new 
England) : " He was with me for a year. One of 
those wide-reaching, generalize-it-all sort of minds. 
Would write ten thousand words before he found 
the fact that ought to have come first. Never 
would think as I think ; but I had the facts and he 
didn't. I gave an hour a day, I suppose, for a 
year. Don't agree with his thinking now; but it 
was worth while." 

" What was he studying? " I asked. 

" Don't remember, exactly ; history, economics, 
I suppose. The important thing was his mind. 
That is what I was teaching." 

The principle here is evident. It is the living 
together of mature and immature intellects ; it is 
education by contact or by meeting of minds ; and 
it is worth while. Such teaching is expensive ; but 
is expense the first consideration if it results not 



164 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

in subjects partly mastered, but the power to mas- 
ter them completely — in wisdom as well as knowl- 
edge? Is any education too expensive that sinks 
deep? 

" Whatever we cannot pay for is too expensive," 
the American taxpayer answers, " and we cannot 
pay enough first-rate minds to give an hour a day 
personally to all who seek education." Perhaps 
not, and perhaps with adjustment to existing con- 
ditions, we can well afford it. Let that point wait ; 
it is the principle that is important, and this I 
found alive throughout the British schools and uni- 
versities, and in the army, whence it is spreading 
to ours. It would be a curious by-product of the 
war if it should come to us through education in 
demobilization, and so home by the military route. 
I found it in the public schools, where the curricu- 
lum (often with good reason) was secondary to 
what the masters judged was the total mind of the 
boy. I found it in grammar-schools, where the 
discussion was always of what the youngster 
seemed to be good for in actual life, not what he 
had learned. I heard of it operating in the in- 
ternment camp at Riihleben, where every man who 
knew became the center of a little tutorial group, 
each member of which afterward formed other 
groups until education of that vital kind which 
comes from self-help under criticism and direction 



EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 165 

spread throughout the curious assemblage of all 
kinds and classes imprisoned together because they 
were Britons. 

Can such personal education be adapted to the 
vast and heterogeneous needs of a democracy? 
A group of Fellows, picked men as they are nowa- 
days, living in monastic seclusion in a gray-walled 
Cambridge garden, with a chosen race of boys ex- 
posed, like volunteers in a medical experiment, to 
culture and intellectual honesty and the desire to 
know until the infection takes — such a system, in 
spite of rigidities and archaisms, is sure to produce 
some remarkable results. But there will be no 
monastic seclusion for our millions in America ; no 
period of undisturbed incubation, no high propor- 
tion of trained to untrained minds. Is the thing 
possible or desirable in a democracy? 

I should not have written an article in war-time 
on a subject like this if I did not believe that there 
was the best kind of evidence of the highest im- 
portance for Great Britain, and potentially im- 
portant for us, that you can practically educate 
by the meeting of minds in a democracy. Nothing 
better proves the vitality of the English idea of 
how to educate than its reaching out to meet the 
new conditions of life that, beginning a decade or 
more ago, are now rushing throughout the British 
world. I mean the W. E. A., the Workmen's Edu- 



166 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

cational Association, the training-school whence 
many of the most alert political and economic 
thinkers in England have sprung or been inspired. 

Every one should know about the W. E. A., even 
in America, for it has not lacked advertisement. 
Books have been written upon it as a successful 
educational experiment ; its doctrines and practice 
have been preached here as well as all over the 
British Empire ; and those familiar with the cur- 
rents of British thought know that, in its effects, 
it is a political force of the first magnitude. Nev- 
ertheless, it will bear brief explaining. The W. E. 
A. is only fifteen years old. I know its founder, a 
workman, and its first tutors, still youngish men. 
It began at Oxford, not, like so many " settle- 
ments," to " uplift " the lower classes, but defi- 
nitely and consciously as a means of bringing 
together workmen who wanted to understand the 
economic system of which they were a part, and 
students of economics and sociology who, while 
teaching the theory of their subjects, could learn 
the practice from the men and women they taught. 
Thus the W. E. A. is distinctly a meeting of minds, 
designed to train the less skilled, but with advan- 
tages for both. 

A group of men and women (never larger than 
thirty-two) forms among workers, let us say, in 
the pottery industries of the " Five Towns " dis- 



EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 167 

trict. They choose a course, which will probably 
begin with a history of industrial conditions, as of 
closest kin to their interests, but may lead through 
politics, science, history, literature, wherever they 
want to go, provided that it consists of such re- 
lated subjects as a university might require. The 
course is three years as a minimum, with an oppor- 
tunity to spend a week in Oxford or Cambridge or 
some other university summer school afterward, 
and they must elect the course for three years. 
There are twenty-four meetings a year, a week 
apart ; two hours each of them, an hour roughly 
for the tutor's disquisitions, one hour for free dis- 
cussion. The tutor comes from the university, the 
cost is borne by the university, by labor organiza- 
tions, and by the board of education. Books are 
used freely, and are supplied by the association. 
There are no examinations, no work for a certifi- 
cate or direct means of betterment, because no 
competition is desired ; but twelve essays must be 
written a year. Where the subject is taken up, 
how it is developed, what questions are discussed — 
these are not to be found in syllabi, but depend up- 
on the intelligence, the previous training, the pres- 
ent interests of the group and the tutor. It is not 
forced-draught education, but rather the meeting 
of minds between men and women desiring to in- 
crease their power of criticizing life and an in- 



168 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

structor who, like an earlier Englishman, would 
gladly learn and gladly teach. The emphasis is 
all upon the personal relation. And this simple 
system has spread widely over Great Britain and 
Ireland, has captivated " materialistic Australia," 
and, through the adoption of its principles in much 
army teaching, is becoming familiar to the whole 
empire. The sanity, the vigor, and, most impor- 
tant of all, the political vision of the best labor 
leaders of Great Britain, now probably the broad- 
est and soundest defenders of labor interests in the 
world, come, most of all, I think, from the example 
of the W. E. A. 

I have tried to make clear that this is no ran- 
dom philanthropic experiment, but rather a 
sprouting into new life of a national instinct. 
This is what makes it worth writing about for 
readers who have only a general interest in edu- 
cation. Essentially, the W. E. A. puts mature 
but untrained minds into touch with men who care 
immensely for the intellectual welfare of the com- 
munity. I saw the same principle working in a 
great factory in the north of England, whose man- 
agers had run ahead of the continuation schools 
proposed by the Fisher bill, and put in schools of 
their own where working boys and girls were given 
from three to six hours a week under men and 
women whose sole interest was in their develop- 



EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 169 

ing bodies and minds. The very heart of the 
Fisher bill was not to teach this or that, but to 
keep the youth of Great Britain for four years 
longer in the care of those who might wish to de- 
velop, not to exploit, them. I heard a master of 
apprentices in an old skilled trade that had in- 
herited the best medieval traditions of boy work- 
ers say one night : " The only way to save Eng- 
land after this war is to have more education for 
the boys and girls. I don't care what they teach 
them, though I should prefer to have it general as 
well as technical; the important thing is that it 
should be somebody's business to look after their 
minds." 

I believe that this sound instinct for true educa- 
tion has been the chief cause of British initiative 
and political and intellectual strength in the cen- 
tury past, and I further believe that it explains the 
surprising strength of Great Britain when, in sud- 
den catastrophe, she was thrown from peace into 
deadly conflict with a nation far more completely 
trained than herself. The flat truth is that the 
German was better educated, in so far as education 
means knowledge and discipline, than the English- 
man, especially in the lower and middle grade of 
society; and yet less excellently educated in the 
things that make for wisdom. The British defi- 
ciencies — lack of science, lack of system, lack of 



170 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

a breadth of opportunity — we have already 
avoided. They may be left for home correction, 
but we must not disregard, as of local concern 
only, the secret that has made England successful 
in spite of her faults. 

War makes men dishonest as regards the future, 
for the rush of passions toward desire for victory 
drowns judgment and common sense. But the in- 
tense reality of war-time makes us very honest 
toward our past. What American, looking back 
from 1919, does not find his estimate of school or 
college education vastly altered? Experiences he 
had supposed were not education at all — ad- 
ventures, casual reading, personal relationships — 
have clearly taught him much. Whole sets of 
formal training appear as lost motion utterly. 
Habits formed in work he hated under minds that 
impressed him, ideas shot irregularly from the 
world of knowledge that took root somehow — 
these remain. Does he doubt that his best educa- 
tion was self-acquired? Does he doubt that a 
steadying hand, a pointing finger, an atmosphere 
where learning seemed worth while, were the best 
things that came to him (if he got them) from 
teaching in school and college? What sheer 
brain prostitution was most of his " tutoring " for 
examinations! What unnecessary boredom the 
recording of " facts " from innumerable lectures 



EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 171 

heard and not heeded ! What unspeakable benefit 
the few " inspirations " from minds greater and 
sweeter than his, when the spark shot and hit and 
smoldered and is still burning! 

Why can we not now be honest about education 
in America? Why can we not say that it is too 
arid, too impersonal, that it is successful only be- 
cause life in America has itself been an education? 
Are we too proud to borrow this British secret 
from a nation that in many respects is less edu- 
cated than our own? Are we too proud to borrow 
for our many what has been given to their chosen 
ones with a success that our best curricula have 
seldom known? Our technical, scientific education 
in advanced work has been highly individual, and 
the results are where all can see them. Why is it 
that in the things of the mind — in his criticism of 
life, in his sense of values, in his knowledge of how 
to use his vital energy — the American is still so 
crude, so youthful in comparison with Englishmen 
less vigorous and less potential? It is because his 
" liberal " education has blown over him in airy 
precepts, has been fed to him in capsules swallowed 
but never digested, has come to him wrapped in 
words instead of active personality. 

And the difficulties in the way, the expense, the 
magnitude of the problem ! The energy absorbed 
by a week of war would carry an intellectual revo- 



172 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

lution. A few slight changes in the practice of 
our American colleges as they were run before the 
war would make important changes with little dif- 
ficulty. The ratio of teachers to students was in 
good institutions of collegiate grade roughly as 
one to ten. If each teacher were given a personal 
responsibility for the minds of, say, ten men, ex- 
ercised perhaps only in the briefest of weekly meet- 
ings, the increase in toil, where there was any, 
would be balanced by the inspiration of friendly 
contact, increase in expense there would be little 
or none. Now we choose " division officers " and 
ask them to be personally responsible for the in- 
tellectual conscience of sixty-odd students ; the 
rest of the faculty need only teach. Such a 
change would be only a beginning, just a little 
fresh blood pumping through old arteries — but 
we would soon go farther. 

Already we have entered upon one of the great- 
est of all educational experiments — an army of 
youths trained for war, who must be prepared for 
peace while in demobilization. Although the cir- 
cumstances are so widely different, the problem is 
almost identical with that of the W. E. A. Fairly 
mature minds, of every degree of previous train- 
ing, are in both instances to be given quickly and 
in the midst of distractions what they vitally need 
to make life more livable. Shall we hand them in 



EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 173 

lectures the general knowledge they require in ad- 
dition to their ration of technical instruction; or 
by personal contact with those who know shall 
they be made to crave and get knowledge? The 
two methods are different ; and the second, though 
hard, is practicable, and in the long run the 
cheaper. 

Very soon now, and in a wrecked world, we shall 
fully realize how precious is youth, how essential 
that not one drop of its energies shall be wasted. 
We will direct our courses of study toward the 
needs of the future, and direct them easily and well, 
for there we have practice. But shall we place the 
emphasis upon courses and systematized depart- 
ments of learning or upon the shaping of minds to 
crave facts and get them? The two methods go 
together ; but they are different, and without the 
second the first alone will never meet the emer- 
gency. Since the days of Plato men have been 
saying in every language and environment : " It 
was, after all, one or two men who educated me. 
They set me thinking." How far in America will 
we act upon that principle? How far have we 
acted upon it? Consider the text-book, his mul- 
titude and his aridity, if you wish an answer. 

We Americans, however, also have our national 
instinct in education. It is a commonplace to say 
that from the founding of the nation we have tried 



174 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

to give equal opportunities to all to be educated. 
Indeed we know what was proposed better, per- 
haps, than what has been accomplished. English 
observers, now that England is on the way to sud- 
den social democracy, see it most clearly, and are 
eager to learn of us. Our intense systematiza- 
tion, our standardization of teachers and teaching 
and subjects and text-books — that very machin- 
ery whose noisy grinding has so often drowned the 
voice of personal instruction — all this is just a 
means of realizing our national instinct for demo- 
cratic education. No other nation in the world, 
not even highly trained Germany, has tried to open 
all kinds of education to everybody ; and if we have 
made tremendous errors we have also invaluable 
experience. England has as much to learn from 
our high-school system as we have from her theory 
of how to teach. 

The cry there is, Be practical and consider the 
taxpayer. And the reply in England is that the 
taxpayer deserves, first of all, education for his 
money, and that he must therefore get access to 
vital education. The cry in America is the same, 
and the answer should not be different. But unless 
we learn from one another, both sets of taxpayers, 
as in the past, will be cheated. A hundred pounds 
for a child's education is cheap if you get results ; 
is dear if the factory takes the child prematurely 



EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 175 

and exploits him. A thousand dollars (the price 
of a great shell) is little to spend upon a child's 
education, if he gets educated. 

Four years ago an essay like this one should 
have been a treatise on education, or remained un- 
written. It should have surveyed at length our 
schools and colleges and those of the English, ex- 
plaining the methods, criticizing them, pointing 
out how, by marked changes in our purpose and 
slight ones in our practice in teaching, we could 
vastly increase our results, pointing out that by 
more system and a restricted standardization the 
British could extend their benefits to a whole pop- 
ulation. The Workmen's Educational Associa- 
tion, which has accomplished both these ends, 
would have provided merely an adequate introduc- 
tion. 

It is different now. Still in the shadow of war 
we can make no elaborate plans, but with every- 
thing on the move about us we are in the very mood 
for seizing new principles. Many have felt for 
years that a period of productive work in the 
world should precede the ending of every educa- 
tion, yet could never contrive general acceptance. 
Now the war has forced our boys, many of them 
half educated, into the most intense of practical 
experiences, and we begin to see how youthful 
service to the state, continued after the war, may 



176 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

be a real aid to education. One hopes that the 
service may not be exclusively military, that Wil- 
liam James's fine dream, " A Moral Substitute for 
War," will find unexpected realization. 

Two years ago in America we were criticizing 
the dogmatic character of most of our educating, 
and wondering helplessly how we could teach the 
teachers of boys and girls that learning came by 
working out problems, not by hearing the answers. 
Then with a sweep our youths were flung into the 
highly experimental business of war, where all ad- 
vance, from the shooting of a gun to food control, 
is learned only by practice. Will the boy of 
eighteen who has been through a training-camp 
and the new life of the trenches, where he has 
learned by doing them new ranges of activities — 
will he ever again take second-hand statements of 
theory in history or economics or literature, and 
think he is being educated? The answer may be, 
yes — if we let him. But will we let him? For 
we also have learned by experience, have been 
grasping new principles. 

The truth is that everybody is being re-educated 
now, except those petrified beings who are beyond 
alteration ; and, where every one is learning, there 
is no opportunity for one age to impose upon an- 
other its sets of crystallized ideas that must be 
accepted whole or evaded. Education is vital 



EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 177 

again because it has become a universal experience. 

I spent a day last spring in the Bull Dog Club 
on Edgeware Road in London, an institution that 
began as a home for soldiers on leave with nowhere 
to go, and then extended its care to discharged 
men whose old careers were lost to them and who 
needed guidance and help. Everywhere in Eng- 
land one heard the questions : What are the half- 
educated eighteen-year-olders to do when they 
come back, tired boys without a trade or profes- 
sion? What are the sometime clerks to become 
after two or three years in the honorable but im- 
permanent profession of being an officer? Will 
they go back? What are the gentleman rankers 
to do, impaired in health, without either profession 
or money, and thrown upon the unsettled labor- 
market of England after the war? I was inter- 
ested, naturally, in an opportunity to get advance 
information from a club where every day such 
cases were already being handled. The man with 
a trade is easily placed, they told me. The men 
without a trade and lacking in especial intellectual 
ability are a grave problem. Of the men with 
brains and intellectual training, many of them say 
that they want to go in for teaching. 

It surprised me then, but not after I had been to 
the front and lived longer in France and England. 
It was minds these men wanted to teach, because 



178 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

their own had been altered. War, as Thucydides 
said, educates by violence ; and by violence these 
soldiers had been educated to understand what a 
man must know about life. If I were searching for 
teachers I should choose them in preference to 
others with more knowledge but a less illuminating 
experience. 



VIII 
ON THE NEXT WAR 

The next war will not be over Ireland, as certain 
Sinn Feiners believe ; nor yet against Germany, as 
a year ago there was too much reason to expect. 
It will be between idealists and realists worked out 
in terms of the world instead of Germany or Ire- 
land ; and there is reason to hope that if there is 
bleeding it will be from pocket-books, and if bomb- 
ing, it will be of prejudices, and if pain, it will be 
the mental agony of those who will be forced to 
choose a side and sacrifice much in the choosing. 

All over the world the liberals and the conserva- 
tives are drawing apart and preparing for battle. 
It is not a question of parties, or rather, it will 
soon cease to be ; it is a difference in temperament 
or privilege that separates them. A millionaire 
may be radical if his temperament is right for it ; 
a poor man may be crustily conservative. And 
some liberals become conservative with a turn in 
the market or a new job. 

The dangers of the liberal we know well. His 
idealism, especially when it is naive, makes him 
sometimes futile, and often the prey of the destruc- 
tive radical. But he is the engine of modern civ- 
ilization. If he stalls or is wrecked, it is difficult 
179 



180 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

to conceive of a future that will be interesting to a 
man of democratic and humanitarian tastes. 

The conservative, of course, is the brake, and 
the figure is not uncomplimentary, since an invalu- 
able function is exercised by a mechanism designed 
to retard. The danger of the honest conservative 
has been little exploited in the press, especially in 
war-time America. We have filled pages describ- 
ing the means by which the gentle pacifist became 
a cat's-paw for the ravening militarist. Every 
one knows, or thinks they know, that the socialist 
and pacifist were mere tools of German propa- 
ganda. Few see that now the war is over an iden- 
tical game is being played elsewhere. The con- 
servative temperament is the natural prey of the 
possessive instinct. Whosoever intends to hold 
more than he has earned of wealth or position seeks 
the laudator tempores acti, the sincere upholder of 
tradition, the opponent of flashy progress and 
doubtful change, to do his arguing for him, and 
supply moralities for his campaign. Because the 
idealism of the American international program of 
1919 seems to depart too far from an old order 
which he had found good, because he distrusts the 
enthusiasm with which European radicals greet 
it, many an honest conservative unwittingly has 
allied himself with the mammon of possessiveness, 
with men who profited by the unscrupulous com- 
petitions that led directly toward 1914, and re- 
gardless of the world's agony wish to continue 
them. 

I have seen the superintendent of a great Eng- 
lish munition works strike the table with his fist, 



ON THE NEXT WAR 181 

declaring, " By God, we must have boys to tend 
our furnaces, and we'll wreck any government that 
tries to take them away to educate them ! " And 
I have heard an American of pure heart and lofty 
ideals argue for irritating tariffs, inequitable tax- 
ation, and individualism (whether of nations or of 
capitalists) unrestrained, simply because " any- 
thing was better than Bolshevism," to which the 
opposite policies, so he professed to think, might 
lead. The pity of it ! There are, says the edito- 
rial writer, three real parties in the world as it is, 
the conservative, the liberal, and the radical. I 
deny it. There are only two : the honestly liberal 
and the honestly conservative. But their numbers 
are small in comparison with the predacious 
(whether Bolsheviks or reactionary) whose opin- 
ions are their pocket-books, and the horde of the 
innocent, the muddled, and the prejudiced upon 
whom they prey. 



WHEN JOHNNY COMES MARCHING HOME 

Three questions men everywhere in the Western 
world have asked constantly in their hearts : Can 
Germany be beaten? When will peace come? 
What will happen after the war? The first is 
settled; the second has found its reply; the third 
is hard upon us. The answer will be a drama al- 
ready prepared and set, with the curtain just ris- 
ing, a drama of uncertainties. And the great un- 
certainties are: What will the soldiers want? 
Into what has the war made them? What will 
they do, British, French, American, when they 
come home? 

No one knows, but many are speculating, espe- 
cially of course in Europe, where four years of war 
have changed men, body and brains and soul, from 
their earlier selves. Six months ago, in London, 
an editor told me of a straw vote he had taken in a 
hospital ward to determine how many men there 
had changed their political allegiance. The per- 
centage of change was high, and the Labor Party 
was indicated as a new favorite ; but this is not the 
significant point in the story. Within the next 
few weeks that anecdote was quoted in several Lon- 
182 



WHEN JOHNNY COMES HOME 183 

don newspapers ; a little later it made the emphatic 
first paragraph of a political article in the most 
influential American monthly ; and I have seen it 
cropping up again and again since. It is clear 
that we are vastly ignorant of the real ideas of the 
soldier, if a straw vote among twenty men is taken 
as evidence of the minds of the millions at the 
front. 

Has the soldier definite ideas upon social reform, 
or international relations, or politics? Has he 
become radical, or reactionary, or pacifist, or mil- 
itarist? My own observation leads me to doubt it 
strongly. The Americans have been too busy with 
a new environment to think much. The British 
and the French have been too tired. I am writing, 
of course, of the common man, private or officer. 
More sensitive minds have been set strongly vi- 
brating. Intellectuals have found trench life not 
unfavorable to speculation. But the army as a 
whole seems to live a simple, unreflecting life, 
spaced, as a British officer said, between disagree- 
able boredom and still more disagreeable danger. 
The soldier in general is fixed upon his single pur- 
pose and not inclined to go beyond the next pos- 
sible shell burst in considering the reconstruction 
of the world. My chief recollections of conversa- 
tions during two weeks spent with a miscellaneous 
group of officers, are of the novelty of the sur- 



184 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

roundings, the interest of the new facts we had to 
discuss, and the platitudinous staleness of the 
general ideas proffered upon the war and the 
future. " Things are going to be different after 
the war," was about as far as we got. Indeed, 
active service, no matter how novel, is not usually 
a breeder of ideas. What it does is to form new 
habits of mind. 

We need, of course, no psychologist to tell us 
that it is not new thoughts so much as the things 
behind thinking that bring about great changes. 
In habits of mind fixed by experience, not in ran- 
dom conversations, or ideas shot off in the stress 
of argument, lies the birth of the new world, if one 
is to come after the war. The enthusiast is given 
free play in a time of general upset. Since with 
civilization at war anything seems possible, he sees 
a new heaven and a new earth, with no one to gain- 
say him. But we know well that when this old 
lumbering wagon of a world jolts back into the 
ruts again we will jog on indifferent to the voice 
of the exhorter, even though the tears in his eyes 
as he spoke of education universal and poverty 
abolished made our own moist with hope. Ora- 
tory and optimism, ideas no matter how burning, 
have little chance with use and want. But with 
habits the struggle is more equal. If we ask, How 
will the soldiers act? What will they want? it is 



WHEN JOHNNY COMES HOME 185 

to their new emotions aroused and made perma- 
nent, their new ways of thinking become habitual, 
that we must look for answer. No man in the 
armies of the world has been living as he lived 
before the war. Only the most inflexible have been 
feeling and thinking in just the same fashion. 
There is the vital difference, and it will determine 
the future. 

What habits will Johnny bring home with him? 
He will bring military discipline, of course, a 
readiness in obeying orders, precision in executing 
them, respect for superiors, and a livelier attention 
to the needs of those about him. This may cure 
some of the slackness of the unmilitary nations ; 
but I think it means little in itself that is funda- 
mental. America and Great Britain in peace 
times (now that we look backward) were not worse 
off, for all their lack of discipline, than Germany 
and France. Discipline, like a good accent, is an 
admirable thing unless you pay too much for it. 
Germany paid too much. I cannot believe that it 
is military discipline which is going to transform 
either Great Britain or America. 

Nor do I believe in a veiled and powerful mili- 
tarism behind this discipline which will change us, 
as some fear, body and soul. The Britisher, as 
many will tell you, is less militaristic than before 
the war. The American, who was not militaristic 



186 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

at all, will find himself unchanged, unless, indeed, 
the war ended so quickly that thousands of us re- 
main overstocked with fighting spirit. The pas- 
sion for modern war as such which one finds bot- 
tled in many Americans on this side of the water, 
would be humorous if it were not potential of diffi- 
culties in the future. There should be some savage 
African district, well supplied with wire-entangle- 
ments, tanks, bombs, shrapnel, gas, mud, and lice, 
and garrisoned by a cannibal tribe trained by 
Prussian officers and needing extinction, the whole 
to be used as a cooling ground for soldiers who 
came into war too late to discover what a horrible 
business it is when separated from lofty principles. 

Habits of mind more deep-reaching than the 
discipline of drill, and more universal than left- 
over blood-thirstiness, Johnny will bring back 
with him. He has been made simple, and he will 
demand simplicity in the life to which he is re- 
turning. 

War introduces an enormous complexity in the 
business of running the state, but great simplicity 
in the life of the individual soldier. There was a 
window in the Army and Navy stores in London 
given over entirely to devices for simplifying life ; 
a combination bed-roll and kit-bag that would 
carry everything the soldier needs ; trench outfits 
in which the paraphernalia of a flat, minus the 



WHEN JOHNNY COMES HOME 187 

furniture, was reduced to essentials and tucked 
into a parcel ; devices whereby all that was needed 
in the science of war hung by hooks or wrapped by 
bands around you. And the married man, with a 
house and a garden and a motor and a wife and 
two children and a thousand different articles be- 
longing to and occasionally used by him, entered 
the door mentally loaded with them all, and left 
physically staggering under his kit, but bearing 
about him all that he needed for France or Syria, 
for a month or the duration of the war. 

And this simplification of the means of life has 
its complement upon the battlefield in the simpli- 
fication of the ends of life. The hopes, the pur- 
poses, the desires of the soldier, whose weights op- 
press in peace time, are reduced to their lower 
limits. He hopes to win, or to get a " good little 
wound," or merely to stay alive. His purpose is 
to obey orders, to do his bit toward winning the 
war, to get the approval of his superiors and com- 
panions. He desires food, sleep, the long-deferred 
home-coming; he desires promotion. It is all as 
simple as going camping, when your sole desire is 
to catch fish, keep warm, and have a good time; 
and it has the same effect of general brain clear- 
ing. Some men, notably I believe the mechanics 
of our industrial system, whose life had already 
been rendered simple by machinery, passed into 



188 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

this new order with little change except an inter- 
est they had never felt before, accompanied by new 
hardship and pain. But for most men such an 
unshipping of life's goods, material and spiritual, 
means a transformation. For good or ill? Some- 
times the one, sometimes the other; too long con- 
tinued almost universally for ill. That, however, 
is not the question. Of more immediate impor- 
tance is the effect of this new simplicity of exist- 
ence upon the returning soldier, upon the world to 
which he is returning. 

Others have doubtless observed that the British 
soldier at the front or on leave complained, when 
he talked at all of home affairs, of the " fussiness " 
and the " indirection " of the government for 
which he was fighting. He wanted to be rid of 
" politicians," and of people who " beat about " 
and talk without getting anything done. He was 
impatient with statesmen who " wobble " and in- 
terfere with immediate action. In fact, what he 
meant by " politician " seemed to be a man who 
debates and discusses instead of doing something 
with the directness and simplicity of an order from 
G. H. Q. It is worthy of curious note that the 
men most inclined to criticism of this nature are 
often the speculative, philosophic fellows who be- 
fore the war must have spent many an hour in 
analyzing action and its motives. In the Ameri- 



WHEN JOHNNY COMES HOME 189 

can Army, the critics of " Washington " displayed 
the same fine impatience with debate that might 
delay the order which set men and things in imme- 
diate motion. These men had become habituated to 
a life of simple direct action, and were impatient 
of any attitude toward the exigencies of the world 
more complex than their own. 

It is not improbable that civilian life is too com- 
plex for efficiency, and the ratio of talk to accom- 
plishment may have been in these years of war too 
large. All one can say is that in Great Britain's 
end of the war (our own is too brief for judging, 
and as to France I do not feel competent) it is 
reasonably clear that the great errors have been 
about equally shared between the military and the 
civilians at home. This need not be debated here. 
What is more important for the future is, that 
Joe Brown the machinist and William Cosgrave 
the lawyer will bring home with them the habits of 
the soldier, with effects that will last longer than 
the physical disturbances of war. 

It may be argued from this that we shall have 
an overturning of things-as-they-are when the sol- 
diers come marching home. Strong words may be 
expected of them. What a mess, they may say, 
our government of wire-pulling and chit-chat has 
become! Let us issue general order number 217, 
and change it. What a silly confusion is our edu- 



190 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

cational system, where pupils dawdle over work 
that should interest them and doesn't ; or are held 
down to study that can never do them any good! 
General order 325 will be a cure for that. Issue 
it. What nonsense that fat porker Jones should 
waste income he doesn't earn, while Tom Reilley 
slaves on less than a living wage ! Let the G. H. Q. 
at Washington act and act quickly ! 

Doubtless we shall get quicker, simpler action 
when the boys come home, but it is unwise to be 
optimistic, if you are a liberal, and unnecessary to 
be pessimistic, if you are a conservative. It is, 
after all, the simplicity of war that is artificial, 
not the complexity of peace. Efficient govern- 
ment, effective education, social justice, are all 
very difficult things to achieve. They cannot be 
brought about by general orders. The difficulty 
is not, as our more rigid advocates of " prepared- 
ness " supposed in 1915, that the civilian world is 
too undisciplined and will not obey; but rather 
that you cannot advance civilization by ordering 
it forward. If hill number 217 is taken as a re- 
sult of a general's commands, it is taken, that is 
all there is to it; and hill number 221 becomes a 
possible objective. But a general order to redis- 
tribute wealth might have results no man can fore- 
see. War stands in the same relation to normal 
life as the simple desires of a child to the complex 



WHEN JOHNNY COMES HOME 191 

and often self-defeating motives that actuate a 
man. When Johnny comes marching back he will 
find, like General Grant, that his peace world 
doubles and twists away from his simplifications. 
A just government and a happy family life are 
more difficult to capture than the enemy's trench. 

Let us give over therefore expecting Utopias, 
socialist or otherwise, and look not at dim proph- 
ecy but at definite accomplishment. What the 
war has done to the world is not yet evident ; what 
it has done to men begins to be clear, though not, 
of course, the extent or the durability of the 
changes. I shall be content in the paragraphs 
that follow to note a few simple observations on the 
front and behind the lines which seem to me sig- 
nificant, and better worth recording than prognos- 
tications because, if they are true, they point to 
new habits, new emotions that will function in the 
future, and be among the shaping forces of the 
world that lies ahead. 

The remarkable thing to me about the psychol- 
ogy of the soldier, especially the young soldier, is 
the definiteness with which he faces the future. 
And this is due, I am sure, to simplicity in that 
military life of which I have been writing. War 
has crystallized his mind. The vagueness of 
twentieth century youth, the blind and wasteful 
groping which we teachers knew so well, has given 



192 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

place largely to a habit of crisp decision that will 
remain. 

Two illustrations will serve to make clear my 
meaning. I was en route on a French railroad 
near Grammercy when a lieutenant of aviation got 
into my compartment. I had known him well 
only twelve months before, an eager, " literary " 
boy, alive with aspirations that kept jostling each 
other, so that one week he was writer, the next 
a social thinker, and the third mere waster of 
time. What his " people " wanted him to do was 
in sharpest conflict with his own desires ; but just 
what these desires were neither he nor I could say. 
And I found in the train that day a simple, cheer- 
ful boy, fascinated by his work, rather expecting 
to be killed but not bothering about it, quite ready 
to do the thing that most appealed to him without 
considering the cost or what might come after- 
ward. What he will want after the war I do not 
know; but he will know, and know quickly. His 
mind had cleared. 

The other was a man of my own age who had 
already a reputation for scholarship in a difficult 
subject. Esthetics was his field, but he had 
thrown it over for artillery organization. " This 
generation," he said, as we talked one night on a 
steamer, " is done with analysis of the past. Def- 
inite, constructive work, on bridges, or politics, or 



WHEN JOHNNY COMES HOME 193 

airplanes, or social reform is what men will get 
their minds on. I've put a period in my work. 
I'm beginning over again," he pointed at the nose 
of a gun, " with this." Perhaps he is right ; per- 
haps, as I believe, he is far too absolute; but at 
least his mind also had crystallized under the stress 
of war. 

Indeed, I think that Romain Rolland saw 
clearly, as far as his sight could go, in that volume 
of " Jean Christophe " in which he described the 
new generation as a race weary of introspection, 
criticism, and vagueness, and seeking action. Ac- 
tion they have had to satiety, with good results no 
doubt for those who have stayed alive. I doubt 
whether they will crave violent action again. And 
they are emerging from action with minds that are 
clearer and sharper than ours were, with a de- 
cisiveness that will last. They will know what 
they want, and go after it. Whether they will 
get it is, of course, another question. 

I did not at first connect another quality of the 
soldier mind with the new decisiveness ; but reflec- 
tion shows that they both spring from the simplic- 
ity of military life and its escape from the com- 
plexities of peace. I mean the frank sincerity of 
the soldiers, especially the young soldier. Every- 
one who has moved through France and England 
comments upon this, and indeed the soldier poetry 



194 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

which is coming back so abundantly has frankness 
and simple sincerity for its prime qualities. 
Among young Americans the result has been to 
lift the ban upon the emotions, especially where 
danger has been mixed in the cup. In a month at 
the University Union in Paris, I heard young col- 
lege men talk more freely of religion, beauty, fear, 
affection, and the passions generally than in years 
of ordinary college experience. 

And this has been furthered by the breaking 
down of racial barriers ; for each race has its own 
especial reservations which have become conven- 
tional, and the discovery that other nations ex- 
press them freely has had a salutary effect. The 
Englishman seldom talks of what he has done and 
how he feels about it ; the Frenchman is silent upon 
family life ; the American speaks only shame- 
facedly of his intellect and his esthetic emotions. 
What a surprise it has been for our boys to hear 
their French masters in the science of war talk 
literature, music, art, and philosophy in dug-outs 
and trenches! What an experience (and perhaps 
a release) for the Englishman to join upon equal 
duty with an American in whom genial effusiveness 
clearly did not indicate inferiority ! All such ex- 
periences, and danger most of all, join with a 
simply directed life to unlock the natural man and 
promote sincerity. We may be sure that the soldier 



WHEN JOHNNY COMES HOME 195 

will come back more honest in saying and knowing 
what he feels ; more truthful therefore in living, 
and more ready to shatter conventions. And the 
effect of this is bound to be evident in politics and 
social relations as well as in talk and in literature. 
What puzzles me most is the commonest of all 
experiences in the army and wherever the war 
comes close to the heart. I cannot tell whether its 
intensity is due to the brutality of war, which it 
offsets, and will dim with the recurrence of normal 
times, or whether, indeed, a new emotion has been 
stirred in human nature, as in the early days of the 
French Revolution, and will last for decades. I 
mean this time the release of friendliness in the 
war. I do not mean the effusive sentiment of pub- 
lic speakers and writers of propaganda. That is 
well enough in its way, because it is probably more 
genuine than ever before. What I am remember- 
ing is not compliments, but the thing itself; that 
curious affability which has spread through the 
Allied world until an American finds friendly moods 
(which mean more than friendly words) in every 
railroad compartment in England or France. Con- 
fidence is at the base of it ; confidence that you and 
the machine gunner and the clerk in the Admiralty 
and the expert on the Shipping Board have been 
all wanting the same things and have been 
subject to the same possible misfortunes. It is a 



196 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

mood, indeed, of misfortune, like the sudden friend- 
liness in a house where death is threatening. For 
the war has been bad fortune in some sense, even 
when a release or a stimulus, to us all. 

Have governments ever been friendly to their 
citizens before? But how else can the " nearest 
friend " provision of the British War Office be in- 
terpreted, whereby the wife, the child, the mother, 
or lacking these, the near friend of a dying soldier 
was sent at government charges across the Chan- 
nel to ease his last moments? An acquaintance of 
mine, a worker in a club for soldiers on leave, had 
been kind to a lonely soldier. A message came to 
her one midnight that he was dying in Flanders, 
that he said she was his only friend, that the gov- 
ernment wanted her to go over. And she went, but 
arrived too late. 

Hospitals, especially base hospitals, were organ- 
ized in this war on a program of friendliness. It 
was not merely the carefully planned color schemes 
and decorations of the wards, which betrayed 
friendly consideration for the personalities as well 
as the bodies of the sick and wounded. Nor was it 
only the fixed policy of " cheer up " in which every 
attendant was drilled. No, they were clubs, these 
hospitals. There were men and women in all of 
them whose business it was to be friendly to the 
inmates, to be interested in their personal troubles 



WHEN JOHNNY COMES HOME 197 

and happinesses, and at least at the great Third 
London General Hospital at Wandsworth, dis- 
charged patients had not merely the right, but a 
request to return for a bed and a meal, and the 
privileges of a club in which they had become, so 
to speak, non-resident members. The "nearest 
friend " of an Irish soldier was brought from Ire- 
land to see him before he was to lose a leg by 
amputation. He fretted after she had gone, and 
so they brought her back again to marry him ; for 
said he, " Shure, she mightn't do it after she saw 
my cork leg." Institutions have souls, at least 
in this war. 

Very few men will come back from the trenches 
and the prison camps, the hospitals and the serv- 
ice of the S. O. S., few men or women from the vast 
departments of civilian labor and relief, without 
new friends and new friendliness to make up in 
part for their privations and the abnormality of 
their war years. It will be like the experience of 
life in an American college, which also, in its less 
vivid if more agreeable fashion, brings men and 
women together in a common relationship of labor 
and desire. 

Johnny comes marching home then with a fine 
new sense that life can be mobilized and made 
simple if he wishes it, a scrutinizing sincerity, and 
a new consciousness of kinship with his fellow men. 



198 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

What happens? It will depend, I suppose, upon 
what he finds when he gets home. For the civilian 
mind has been changing also. 

I wonder if we realize how much it has changed. 
I think, perhaps, that one has to be away from 
America for a while among the British where 
change has been ground into the flesh, then return 
to find his home world still in the mold and form 
of earlier days, and yet already in a few months 
enormously altered. It is not the war and war 
fever and patriotism that has made the difference. 
They were all there before, latent, dormant. To 
become vehemently patriotic was an effort, but not 
a change, for the American. His alteration has 
come through doing, not merely by thinking and 
feeling. His change has been in national con- 
sciousness not in national character. Conscious 
service to the state, in which the majority have had 
some part, has brought it about. The familiar 
words conceal the significance of the new public- 
mindedness here in America. We will never go 
back to the fences built round our own business, 
our own home, with their signs, " no thorough- 
fare — except for politicians and philanthropists 
— to the world without." 

This public-mindedness, like military service, 
brings with it a crystallization of ideas. What 
man (or Avhat woman) in civilian life does not find 



WHEN JOHNNY COMES HOME 199 

his ideas more definite, his decisions quicker, his 
demands in politics, in social life, in religion, in 
morals, crisper, clearer, more positive than before 
the war? The material of new political parties, 
for example, is already here, visible to the ob- 
server, although it has scarcely as yet begun to 
trouble the old organizations. Conservatives are 
becoming more definitely and more thoughtfully 
conservative ; liberals more constructively radical. 
In a sense this means that the bourgeois are be- 
ginning to disappear by a process less violent, to 
be sure, than the Russian method of extermination, 
but more likely to benefit the state. The true 
bourgeois, I take it, is the man who having no 
strongly felt class interests has therefore no civic 
loyalties except to his family and vaguely to the 
land of his birth or adoption. The laboring man 
above the lowest grade escapes by his sense of class 
union against the capitalist. The aristocracy, 
where there is one, escapes through its sense of 
caste ; the intellectual by apprehension of world- 
wide relationships ; the professional man through 
esprit de corps. But multitudes of the " middle 
classes," both in Great Britain and America, were 
self-contained and self-centered before the war. 
Their lives were fat ; their brains were fat ; their 
obligations to the community, except as buyers or 
sellers, weak and langorous. All this is changing. 



200 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

A talk in any trolley car or hotel lobby or post 
office or club proves that. It is difficult to live in 
war time and remain thoroughly bourgeois. But 
it is changing very slowly. 

Generalizations upon communities must be a lit- 
tle abstract, for communities, unlike the army, are 
not simplified, centralized, made perforce uniform. 
Nevertheless, it will be freely admitted that home 
has changed ; and therefore we may return to the 
soldier. He will come back with his comradeship 
and his desire for quick, simple decisions into a 
civilization that is at least aroused to the need of 
change in the present and change in the future; 
and what will happen? 

It is easier to guess what may happen in Great 
Britain where the war has run through the whole 
social fabric, than in America where the process 
has little more than begun. The British world has 
been ploughed deep. Minds there have been turned 
up like buried seed and are ready to sprout freshly. 
The rich are prepared to be less rich ; the one-time 
idler expects to continue working; the haters of 
change are prepared actively to resist it; the for- 
ward looking have left speculation for action. 
England is electric with energy and indignation 
and determination and thought. 

On a long and windy road I met a lean figure 
with shy, burning eyes, the forehead of a thinker, 



WHEN JOHNNY COMES HOME 201 

loose clothes that flapped in the wind. He dis- 
mounted from a dusty bicycle and sat beside me to 
rest. A school teacher, an Oxford man, a con- 
servative, he was organizing the farm laborers in 
southwestern England so that they might take 
advantage of the minimum wage which had been 
allowed them in theory but in practice withheld. 
He did not, on the whole, believe in unions ; but the 
minimum wage was an insurance against misery 
and discontent. He made it his business until 
those more fit should succeed him. 

My road ended in the park of a great house 
where I had tea with a " woman of rank," as they 
used to say in the eighteenth century, and a labor 
leader, representatives of the two classes least af- 
fected by the spirit of the bourgeois. 

" What are you going to do with a place like 
mine," she asked, " after the war? It is very ex- 
pensive. We can never pay your taxes, and yet 
it is beautiful. You would miss my week ends ! " 

" We'll make you a government hostess," he re- 
turned quickly. " We can't get along without 
manors and the kind of people that live in them. 
We'll have to find a way." 

It was a banter, of course, but fundamentally 
both Were serious. Like the dark browed, grim 
enthusiast on the bicycle, they were forward look- 
ing. 



202 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

Again, in Oxford, last June, I was given an op- 
portunity to study the results of a questionnaire 
that had been carefully prepared by experts and 
sent to a list of workmen all over Great Britain, 
selected for their shrewd independence of thought. 
One of the questions has reference to the relations 
of labor and capital after the war. The replies 
agreed with absolute unanimity that the " truce " 
between them would end with the war, and that the 
straggle would be renewed and fought to a finish ; 
but they also agreed, with almost as complete a 
consensus, that there were definite grounds of 
agreement, conciliation, and compromise such as 
had never existed before. What are these grounds? 
The writers did not specify. They may have 
meant the Whitely Report and the earlier labor 
and land legislation of Lloyd George. I do not 
think so. They were conscious of something far 
more important — the spirit of co-operation that 
the war has made necessary in England ; and the 
knowledge of how to co-operate which every fac- 
tory and organized industry has had to acquire. 

These men were also forward looking; and so 
is the army which has learned co-operation far 
more thoroughly and added thereto the sanctions 
of comradeship in danger and toil. The army way 
doubtless is far too simple. It will not work in 
peace. The desire to carry on, the direct and 



WHEN JOHNNY COMES HOME 203 

simple action of war time will strike upon the com- 
plexities of the civilian world of privilege and 
shatter ; but the force of the blow may drive Eng- 
land into a new social order where the value of 
work gets a juster assessment. When the soldiers 
come back with their ideas of quickly mobilizing 
the muddled world they left behind them, they will 
perforce divide into a dozen parties, but each will 
find action under way waiting for men to drive it 
on. England will not be militarized; for milita- 
rism is not the kind of simplification that England 
wants. She will probably become more radical, 
for vast numbers at home and abroad seek change. 
She may become more conservative, for the forces 
of reaction and of cautious, thoughtful delay have 
strengthened in opposition. But muddle — which 
is t^ing to be both conservative and radical with- 
out plan or object — will largely disappear. 

It is different in America. Here the war has 
aroused our minds and stimulated decisiveness 
without forcing us to decide. We accepted, though 
slowly, the war; but have not yet accepted the 
necessity of changes to come after it. We have 
become, by contrast with Europe, the great con- 
servative nation. And when Johnny comes pour- 
ing back with his belief in doing things neatly and 
simply and quickly, and his awakened interest in 
his fellow man, there is far more danger than in 



204 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

England of muddle. If his desire for change finds 
no safe outlets prepared for it, there may be unfor- 
tunate results. 

A young American officer outlined to me his idea 
of America after the war. We were to apply the 
principle of conscription to labor. The govern- 
ment was to guarantee all wages and enforce pro- 
duction. The fighting army was to become a 
working army. A simple, well-rounded scheme 
this, eminently adapted to the idea of business as 
the supreme good ; but a flat contradiction of that 
liberty of action which even though we may gladly 
sacrifice it in times of crisis, and rightly limit it 
for the benefit of the community, is still sweet. And 
this is precisely the kind of simplification that 
a man will bring back with him, and find power to 
apply, too, if we at home are not ready with some 
better means of reorganizing our world against 
muddle and inefficiency and exploitation by the 
privileged of the unprotected. 

And that great sweep of friendliness which has 
embraced our troops as well as our comrade armies 
has its dangers also. Let the returning soldier 
find a backsliding America, as anxious to get back 
to conditions before the war as she was to go upon 
a war basis, and what is fine emotion may become 
self-regarding and a menace. Friendship made 
the Grand Army of the Republic, and the power of 



WHEN JOHNNY COMES HOME 205 

friendship made it a political force for such ex- 
ploitation of pensions as the world had not hith- 
erto seen. We want opportunities for service, not 
service pensions, for the veterans of the great war. 
And that means an America where public spirited- 
ness and the desire for interesting action — qual- 
ities that belong to a soldier — are given their 
chance. You can accomplish this in war time by 
general orders from a government in danger, loved, 
and respected. But when the corporation, the 
railroad, the department store, or the university 
again becomes the employer the thing will not be 
so easy. There must be a stake and a share in the 
control of the enterprise for all of the workers. 
Nothing less will guarantee loyalty from men and 
women who have learned by experience how a sense 
of pride in service and equal opportunity sweetens 
hardship and toil. 

Great Britain, in the stress of 1917-1918, when 
relative starvation threatened far more nearly 
than the ignorant realized, when at times there was 
only six weeks' food in sight, allowed the working- 
man who needed much meat to buy double the ra- 
tions permitted to others with more money but less 
muscular fatigue. This is honest, useful democ- 
racy. Great Britain is preparing definitely and 
carefully to house her laborers, to employ them, 
and to educate them in reconstruction. Radical 



206 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

conservatives and radical liberals are joining in 
the determination that such simple truths as the 
needlessness of poverty and the necessity of rec- 
reation should be made true for their country. 
You cannot, as Lloyd George said the other day, 
make an Al nation from C3 inhabitants. The 
British soldier returning from a simple though 
dangerous life may hope perhaps to find one sim- 
pler than hitherto and more agreeable awaiting 
him. 

What are we doing in America against the time 
when Johnny comes home? Are we still satisfied 
with congested slums in a land of broad spaces ; 
with masses of alien illiterates in a country where 
education is general; with degradation and ugli- 
ness and vulgarity in the richest country in the 
world? Is the soldier who has been kept clean, 
made healthy, and taught that his importance to 
his country is measured by his ability, not his bank 
balance, to be asked to accept the old system as a 
complex necessity? After he has been paid in 
respect and thankfulness and honor for his serv- 
ices, is he to be content in the future to spend his 
life being thankful for a wage or a salary that en- 
ables some one for whom he cares nothing to be- 
come richer than necessary? Is it possible that 
after a war in which money as such has long since 
lost its value, we will still believe that money-mak- 



WHEN JOHNNY COMES HOME 207 

ing in the future as in the past is the only duty of 
America ? 

The war lasted too long for Europe. It has 
brought, with much good, misery and some failure 
and degeneration unnecessary to write of here. In 
one sense it lasted too long for America, since it 
has destroyed much capital and more lives, actual 
and potential, than we can yet reckon. But it has 
ended too quickly if we have been merely stirred 
out of our armchairs of individualism to sink back 
with peace. When the soldier comes home he 
should find us awake. I saw in a back street of 
London a sign, " Business as usual during altera- 
tions," over the door of a house crushed down, 
powdered by a bomb from an air raid. The Amer- 
ican mind is doing a dangerous amount of business 
as usual, during alterations. Take the sign down 
before the alette sounds and the boys come home. 



IX 

ON SALVAGE AND WASTE 

It was in June of 1918 somewhere on the 
straight roads back of Arras that I first encoun- 
tered the salvage corps. A gigantic truck 
ploughed leisurely through waves of leave-march- 
ing Tommies. Hanging over its sides or perching 
on the piled-up cargo was a jolly crew in overalls 
and scratch uniforms, and on the flank in sprawl- 
ing letters of chalk was scrawled, " What have you 
salved to-day? " I guessed at the load — broken 
rifles, dented tins of bully beef, ammunition, lost 
tents, odd shoes, helmets, revolvers, biscuit cans — 
remembering battle fields still strewn with such 
wreckage. And I recognized in these cheery indi- 
viduals the miniscule representatives of order, 
economy, thrift in a world given over to destruc- 
tion, the pygmy opponents of the vast Titan, 
Waste. 

They were symbols of all of us, the world that 
has been fighting so tenaciously, so cheerfully, to 
salvage a little from the waste of war — the sur- 
geons saving life when legs or arms were gone, the 
generals saving an army corps when half its 
personnel was dead, the old men saving the nation 
after the young men were gone forever. As a 
spectacle nothing could be finer — or more pa- 
208 



ON SALVAGE AND WASTE 209 

thetic. Salvage is always pathetic. It is excel- 
lent to do it well ; it is better to prevent it. 

And the most pathetic salvage of this war was 
not of damaged goods. It was almost a satisfac- 
tion to see a litter of things we had been accus- 
tomed to call valuable wasted on a battle field, and 
to feel how little the loss of such commodities mat- 
tered in comparison with waste of life. It restored 
a true perspective and made one appreciate that 
the standard of values after all is man. Yet I do 
not believe that even the waste of life in war is the 
most pathetic of all losses. In some respects, 
what struck deepest there in the war zone was the 
waste of energies ; energies which had been sup- 
pressed or diverted in peace time, now flaring up 
and out in brief wasteful moments, accomplishing 
much for others but little for themselves. 

I wonder if we will remember that lesson, now 
that the finest energies among us have so many of 
them burnt out. I wonder if we will reconstruct 
a dull, mechanical civilization in which the adven- 
turousness, the initiative, the craving for hardship 
and sacrifice and honor of youth can find outlet 
only in war which so speedily quenches the flame 
and spreads darkness elsewhere. Fine minds have 
responded finely to this war; base minds basely. 
And it was the finest that were the first to force the 
issue, and the first to be lost. Was it right that 
they should wait for war to use their best energies ? 
Is salvage after waste going to be all that modern 
civilization can offer a mind too active for the dull 
routine and low ideals of peace, as peace was un- 
derstood in 1914? Is there no substitute for war? 



210 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

William James raised the question years before 
this conflict. In our search for insurance of com- 
fort and preventatives of conflict, we are in danger 
once more of leaving it unanswered. If the pessi- 
mists force us to answer " no," it will be the opti- 
mistic, energetic youths of the next generation who 
will pay the price. 



WAR'S ENDING 

I climbed in 1918 the hill of Douaumont beyond 
Verdun, a hill torn, swept, and harrowed by shrap- 
nel and high explosive into a ghastly paysage de 
lune, where the tread was always among pits of 
dead green water, and the foot stumbled upon shell 
fragments, rusted wire, rifle butts, or broken bone, 
and the eye saw other hills cut to the sand, and the 
puff of shells exploding. At the top was what 
once had been a famous fort of concrete, now blown 
to bits except for a ruined core behind which a few 
poilus were sheltered in patched dug-outs, waiting 
for the enemy, a lonely, silent group in a lonely 
wilderness of desolation. 

" Stoop and enter," said our Colonel. We bent 
to enter a crumbling hole in the wall, struck our 
helmets on beams of a dark tunnel, then felt it 
widen and lift, until suddenly a door swung open 
and we looked blinking into a great hall full of 
light and the sound of whirring engines. Soldiers 
were everywhere, great guns ready to rise and do 
execution, vast piles of munitions ; and beyond, a 
honeycomb of chambers and corridors in which 
were assembled all the paraphernalia of defensive 
211 



212 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

war, even a " Salle de President Wilson," where in 
the heart of the hill poilus were writing and read- 
ing. In the dripping semi-gloom was the organiza- 
tion of a city underground, garrisoned, equipped, 
ready for siege or attack. Above, crumbling ruins 
beyond repair; beneath, a new creation of energy 
and purpose. This is no parable: it was a real 
fort, with very real soldiers, and the Germans never 
took it; but if there is not a useful parallel here 
with life as it is at the ending of the war, then 
similes have lost their power. 

I am weary of reading accounts of how the war 
has ennobled sordid human nature. Not that they 
are untrue. On the contrary, the half has not 
been told, and before I finish this writing I shall 
hope to add my little testimony of a great awaken- 
ing in a world grown commonplace. But if we 
are to estimate our benefits we must be more frank 
than the correspondents, and more sober than the 
soldier writers aflame with their own moral vic- 
tories. We must look squarely at the ruins of the 
old order, and then search for new life. We must 
take a dose of stern pessimism ; face the facts ; 
acknowledge our casualties of life and will and 
virtue ; and then go after the rewards still unse- 
cured which belong to those who have fought for 
a good ideal against a bad one. 

Inescapable are the material losses of the war, 



WAR'S ENDING 213 

and most of all in men. The wounded, the sick, 
the maimed, and the dead make a sad human paral- 
lel to the broken pile on the hilltop. With the liv- 
ing there is new life and hope stirring beneath the 
surface. The sap runs strong in the youthful 
wounded. Seldom do they admit pessimism, and 
then it is because their nerves are still twanging. 
Shattered bodies are the least of the evils we have 
to fear for the future, except when the mind shat- 
ters too. But it is different with the dead. Death 
is loss. They will not come back. They will not 
do what we hoped of them; they will not be there 
to help when we need them ; a longing memory does 
not atone for a smile or a kiss or the hand of a 
friend. They may do much for us spiritually ; 
nothing more in the flesh. 

It is different too with the unborn. The birth- 
rate has been dropping with frightful rapidity. In 
1917 the births in England and Wales fell to the 
lowest level since 1858. Every day that the war 
continued, so the British Registrar-General esti- 
mated, meant a loss of 7,000 potential lives to 
Europe. " While the war has filled the graves, it 
has emptied the cradles." The separations of war 
were partly responsible and these have largely 
ended. But the effect of strain and stress and 
labor upon women, the effect of wounds and hard- 
ship upon men, these will not quickly pass. Life 



214 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

is cheap at present ; it will be dear in the future, 
especially among our best. We shall have to make 
it more worth living than ever before. 

We can face with more equanimity our other 
material losses. Scientific activity has been so 
enormously quickened by the necessities of war 
that our credit with nature has been turned into 
cash a generation before its normal time of matur- 
ity. The air is ours, and much of underseas. 
Nevertheless, we have been " digging in," not ad- 
vancing in our conquest of the elements. Creative 
science has been diverted almost entirely from re- 
search and devoted to an intensive application of 
principles already known. 

We need not bewail too loudly these brains 
turned to the immediately practical, for our con- 
trol of nature had already far outdistanced con- 
trol of ourselves. But there will be a sad 
accounting in the future for the war's destruc- 
tion of capital — wealth, food, ships, clothing, and 
all the paraphernalia of civilization to an amount 
which no one yet dares calculate. One cannot, it 
is true, be pessimistic over the mere waste of goods. 
We have learned that our wealth is subject to the 
welfare of the community, and though we shall all 
be poorer in the years to come, even, one hopes, the 
profiteers, it will not hurt us much, if distribution 
becomes more equitable. Nevertheless, the war 



WARS ENDING 215 

must be paid for. It must be paid for by the in- 
evitable cession, at least for a time, of many great 
and hopeful movements for education and reform 
which capital, now lost or diverted, made possible. 
We need not be troubled because in the next gen- 
eration Adam must delve and Eve spin ; but men 
have lost part of their reserves of power, even as 
they have destroyed irretrievably a hundred mon- 
uments of irreplaceable art built when the imagi- 
nation worked itself into stone. 

There is nothing in these material losses (at 
least in Great Britain and America) that the 
sturdy-hearted may not shoulder through to the 
new world which is coming. When, however, one 
views the effects of the war upon our minds and 
whatever spiritual qualities we possess, the pros- 
pect is grimmer. Strip away for the moment all 
proper qualifications, forget (as of course for a 
true picture we must not forget) all soul-cheering 
offsets and new creations of good that have come 
from this testing time, and look frankly at the 
darker side. 

Morality is shaken, especially sex morality. 
The old Victorian order was passing, had to pass, 
as its best exemplar prophesied : 

" The old order passeth, giving place to new, 

" And God fulfils Himself in many ways." 

It is not God, however, but some haphazard 



216 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

chance that seems to be fulfilling itself in the gen- 
eral slackening of the moral sense. I mean no 
more than I say. I do not mean decadence ; I 
do not mean corruption; but it is certain that 
men and women are confused and doubtful in 
their judgments of sex relations, inconsistent 
in their actions, less sure of right and wrong 
than before in this generation. As the church 
has vacillated, now choosing one moral attitude 
toward war, now another, so men and women 
— whose lives may be unexceptionable — are 
vacillating, feeling their moral sanctions and in- 
hibitions melting beneath them. I think that this 
had to come. Perhaps it is a blessing, not an 
evil. Much of it, I know, is transitory, and due 
to the mixing of races and the state of war. But 
it is not a happy condition ; habits formed under 
it will be hard to cure. No one blamed the soldier 
for recklessness as regards wine, women, and song, 
when the next week his shell might burst ; but that 
does not lead us to praise the exigency. We shall 
leave Puritanism in its priggishness and its undue 
emphasis of sex, behind us as one result of the war ; 
that is clear, and good. But just now we waver 
on the edge of new moral standards whose bounds 
and sanctions are not visible. 

There would have been a moral shift, for better 
or worse, without the war ; careful readers of con- 



WAR'S ENDING 217 

temporary literature must long since have been 
convinced of that. But another sign of the times, 
the muddying of men's minds, is as much a result 
of the conflict as the deficiency in food supply. In 
1914, we saw with amazement and horror official 
poison curdle the clearest German intellects. No 
such perversion of the reasoning faculty was prob- 
able in the West, because we were not under the 
same necessity of making the worse appear the 
better reasoning, nor were our minds so porous to 
inspired suggestions. But let us not rest content 
with an assertion of superior virtue. We were not 
perfect before the war in sanity of judgment and 
clarity of desire. 

The posters of hate and after-the-war-reprisal 
(a very different thing from punishment) which in 
feeble imitation of the Hun were beginning to ap- 
pear here and in England ; the appeals to indis- 
criminate revenge which have been the stock-in- 
trade of certain sections of the press and of associ- 
ations more patriotic than wise, were clearly not 
signs of strength but of weakness, and were so felt 
by the strong, sane, but silent majority of the 
people. They did not help win the war ; for it was 
& sense of duty and moral indignation that made 
men fight on and on, as they had to do, in this con- 
flict. And these muddier passions, due in England 
to nerve strain, the inevitable result of four ter- 



218 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

rible years, in America to the hysteria of sudden 
effort, have not subsided with the end of the con- 
flict. They are transforming into a greediness for 
revenge, a desire to take profit as well as humilia- 
tion from the beaten enemy, a brutal willingness 
to gain by new-found might, even at the expense 
of allies and friends. They make infinitely diffi- 
cult a peace that will be more lasting than victory. 
But though nerve strain may have been the cause 
of these dangerous tendencies, it is not the thing 
itself. The brute in man everywhere has been 
creeping forth on leash. At the beginning of the 
war Germany broke the leash and let the brute run 
free. We loathed her for it ; and we said wisely 
that in the end she would pay ; for the brute, like 
the fabled giants, is as stupid as he is strong. He 
sees no further than the nearest enemy, and forgets 
that the more savage his blows the greater need 
and therefore the greater will to down him. We 
will never utterly loose him ; not after Belgium in 
1914. But the brute crouches in all of us and is 
more dangerous, even now that the war is over, 
than for centuries before. He has tasted blood 
and violence and loot; and wants more of them. 
Just now he hunts with the Bolsheviks, but, like the 
Devil of the Middle Ages, he is at home in all com- 
panies. Aggressive capitalism, selfish nationalism, 
militarism under new names such as protection of 



WAR'S ENDING 219 

trade, are promising fields for his sport. He must 
be watched. The German brute is defeated; the 
brute universal still bides his time. 

More still must be brought to the confessional. 
War, we know well, some of us too well, is the 
mother of self-sacrifice ; alas, it brings cynicism 
also in its train ! When cynicism enters practical 
politics and becomes the policy of a strong nation, 
it is a world danger and must be scourged to 
humility at any cost of toil and bloodshed. That 
was the head and front of the German offending; 
and to defeat and utterly discredit it in the eyes 
of their world as well as ours, was a duty to which 
above all others we were pledged in this war. 
There is as yet no policy of cynicism in America 
and the Allies, but the danger of moral discourage- 
ment, which cynically lets nature take her own 
rough course, cannot be avoided by denying its 
existence. 

I well remember the sweet-voiced patronne of a 
little hotel in what had once been a Norman shore 
resort, deserted then save for women, old men, and 
refugees. " We were so comfortable before the 
war," she said plaintively, " all friendly, all happy, 
the strangers and us here together." The world 
had played her a trick; she nursed her grievance 
and despaired of the world. 

Too many others, when every ounce of energy is 



220 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

needed, have sunk back because of the war. The 
world has played them a trick also. It proved to 
be inflammable just when they supposed it fire- 
proof. Now that the blaze is out, they are willing 
to rebuild the same old tinder box and relay the 
same old rotten hose. War, they say, is inevitable. 
Why try new devices ? The old will serve our time. 
It will not be our generation that has to fight 
again. This is cynicism; and what is worse, it is 
nihilism, not the less dangerous because its note 
of gentle resignation is easy to understand. 

Intolerance is an aggravated form of the cynical 
disease, and more censurable because more unneces- 
sary — intolerance such as we have scarcely known 
among ourselves since the seventeenth century. 
The radical pacifist supplied a good instance. 
With him, curiously enough for a man who ex- 
pected everything of human nature, the moral 
weakening showed itself in a distrust of all who 
sought his ends by different means. I attended a 
famous meeting in London last February where 
the government was execrated by men of no mean 
position for failing to negotiate with Germany six 
months earlier when there had been tentatives of 
peace. For two hours I listened to speech after 
speech, waiting for a reference to Russia and the 
conditions of Brest-Litovsk. Russia was not once 
so much as mentioned ; and yet other men who had 



WAR'S ENDING 221 

the noblest ideals of Great Britain equally at heart, 
were condemned root and branch because, in the 
light of this infamous settlement, they dared not in 
honesty stop the war ! That was a kind of cyni- 
cism ; it was a bad kind, for it was no more nor less 
than moral snobbery. 

The pacifists might well have replied, of course, 
that they learned intolerance from their adver- 
saries. And indeed the unmeasured violence of the 
attacks upon non-resistants, conscientious ob- 
jectors, international socialists, and other honest, 
if mistaken men with whose methods of concluding 
the war we disagreed, sprang also from cynicism. 
It was the cynicism of the editor and the public 
speaker and the censor, who believed that the com- 
mon man could not be trusted to discriminate be- 
tween arguments and must therefore be guarded 
against all but official thinking. My experience 
led me to conceive more highly of the common man, 
especially in the army, than of the judgment of 
most leader writers and orators. He was con- 
vinced of the justice of his cause and would have 
gained, not lost, by a full discussion of all its im- 
plications. From poisonous propaganda intended 
+o breed distrust he should have been protected, 
and also from morbid and unjustifiable pessimism; 
but hysteric shrieks, platitudinously urging him 
to think only of winning the war and not why he 



222 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

should win it, did no good and (if we still believe in 
democracy) must be supposed to have been an 
active agency for future ill. 

And now that the war is over, we begin to 
glimpse some of the results. Our democracy, 
which is to have the last word in deciding world 
conditions for the future, has been so coddled and 
protected from all opinions except those regarded 
as correct, that its education in international pol- 
itics and the ultimate causes of war is just begin- 
ning, at the precise time when it must confirm or 
oppose decisions involving the welfare of the next 
generation and perhaps the next century. Well- 
meaning censors, like amateur gardeners, have 
pulled up good plants of honest criticism and let 
the weeds of arbitrary dictum and useful but mis- 
leading propaganda grow rankly. If the man in 
the street is not soon taught by free discussion 
what justice, equality, liberty, and other terms now 
used so freely, must mean if carried out in practice, 
there will be a sad tale to tell of these years of 
war's ending. 

But the cynicism I most dislike is that of the 
neo-Prussian, who, with the echoes of his last 
speech on international rights still in the air, and 
the ink of his leader on safeguarding the world 
against the German not yet dry, will pass without 
transition to a poisonous policy of after-the-war 



WAR'S ENDING 223 

aggressiveness in trade and land-grabbing and 
armament, which would make the world safe for 
no one, certainly not for himself. I talked recently 
with a British officer who had been in seven differ- 
ent prison camps in Germany and experienced 
every variety of treatment, from brutality to ut- 
most charity. He said that, between evils, he pre- 
ferred the Prussians to the Bavarians as jailers. 
When the Prussian was harsh, it was by order, and 
one could count at least on consistency ; but if the 
Bavarian was cruel it was because of irresponsible 
malignancy for which there was no rule. I detest 
Prussian ideas and Prussian methods alike; but 
their open cynicism has one advantage over the 
dilute cynicism of their imitators. It can be 
fought openly, as we did fight it until the end. 

These then are our losses. Four years of war 
have told upon the Allies. They are scarred like 
the fort on the hill. And America's brief year and 
a half , although our profits may have been greater 
than our losses, has not passed without leaving 
toxins behind it. But what of the life within? 
For the life within Great Britain I think I can 
speak with some assurance. It is bubbling with 
new energies, moral, physical, and intellectual. 
The parallel with the hidden activities of the sub- 
terranean chambers breaks down, for regeneration 
in Great Britain is as visible as degeneration, and 



224 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

probably more significant. If the weak have be- 
come weaker, the strong have become stronger. 
Alas, that among the latter the war's heaviest cas- 
ualties have come! 

Great Britain has gained in character as much 
as she has lost in wealth. " There is no fool like 
a clever young fool, and we have bred many of 
them," I heard the head of an Oxford College say, 
" but the war has done them good." " How? " I 
asked. " By hurling facts at them. War is like 
a game where you are definitely * out ' if you don't 
succeed — it permits of no arguing. War is like 
the universe. ' I've made a mistake, but I couldn't 
help it,' says the man. ' Out,' says the universe. 
1 I'm young, and I've done my best.' * Out,' says 
the universe. ' I want another chance.' * Out ! ' " 

It is this that makes and hardens character. 
Indeed, character has been hardened in Great 
Britain (and elsewhere) as certainly not for a cen- 
tury. One saw it in a hundred directions. There 
was the mother who had lost her sons and must 
carry on without complaining. There was the 
kindly heart who had learned without bitterness 
that life is cruel and the dark spirit still regnant ; 
the high-souled boy who saw his life-plans wrecked 
by the call to service, and dropped them with quiet 
finality ; the creative thinker who did trivial things 
cheerfully for small but useful results. One felt 



WARS ENDING 225 

a new tone in society. Opinions clashed more be- 
cause men and women were more sincere ; small talk 
had evaporated ; it was a harder, firmer world, in 
which one moved in humbleness as in the presence 
of a completed sacrifice. 

It was a simpler world too, precisely because it 
had more character and was therefore more honest. 
The soldier poetry which came back from France 
was not the rhetorical patriotism of earlier con- 
flicts ; it was full of simple, passionate affection for 
home and the home soil, with a touch of mysticism 
in it which suggested that love of man and woman, 
of sunlight and the woods, went deeper than in the 
use and wont of before the war. Read, for ex- 
ample, " To the Dead " of Gerald Caldwell Siordet, 
himself since killed in action in Mesopotamia : 

"And you — O ! if I call you, you will come 
Most loved, most lovely faces of my friends 
Who are so safely housed within my heart, 
So parcel of this blessed spirit land 
Which is my own heart's England, so possest 
Of all its ways to walk familiarly. . . . 
Then we can walk together, I with you, 
Or you, or you, along some quiet road, 
And talk the foolish, old forgivable talk, 
And laugh together. . . . 
And when at last, by some cross-road, 
Our longer shadows, falling on the grass, 
Turn us back homeward, and the setting sun 
Shines like a golden glory round your head, 
Q 



226 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

There will be something sudden and strange in you. 

Then you will lean and look into my eyes, 

And I shall see the bright wound at your side, 

And feel the new blood flowing to my heart, 

And I shall hear you speaking in my ear — 

O! not the old, forgivable, foolish talk 

But flames, and exaltations, and desires .... 

That like immortal birds sing in my breast, 

And, springing from a fire of sacrifice, 

Beat with bright wings about the throne of God." 

Indeed, forests were still green and flowers 
bloomed, and we saw them gladly ; the comedian 
did his turn for laughing London, and it was right 
to laugh. Man was still man, though made very 
elementary by his tragedies, and it was this sim- 
plicity as much as anything that brought England 
safely through the war. 

Character alone may sometimes save a race, but 
it has not always averted defeat, or eclipse after 
victory. There must be creative energy becoming 
active, not merely stoical, under misfortune. My 
answer to those who say that England (which is 
still the heart of our English-speaking world) is 
decadent, would be a simple one ; they do not know 
the new England; not all, or even most Britons 
know it yet. England reminds me of a vast mili- 
tary tank, crusted with an armor of precedent, 
weighed down by a tremendous burden, creaking, 
protesting, yet irresistibly driven forward over 



WAR'S ENDING 227 

gulf and up precipice. England, with her stiff 
conservatives, her sluggish peasantry, her sodden 
poor, is yet aquiver with new thoughts and new 
movements, that responded with tenacious vitality 
to every call of this exhausting war, and are now 
bent upon salvage and reconstruction. There is 
not a department of life, from the church to fac- 
tory routine, that is not under fierce criticism and 
in process of confused but determined remaking. 

To the visitor it seems muddle — the new un- 
tangling itself from the old only to be hopelessly 
retangled. Yet I think it is not all muddle, but 
rather that whirling chaos from which worlds that 
endure are born. Education must be extended, for 
England finds that she is a span behind her neigh- 
bors. A bill is offered, is half passed, half lost, 
but the principle saved for the future. With a 
heave, the relations of labor and capital are 
brought a whole generation forward, then left to 
be fought over when there is leisure for such war- 
fare. Everywhere the rough facts of failure, 
backsliding, complacency, inefficiency, are received 
with a hurly-burly of conflicting solutions, in the 
midst of which changes and betterments, so radical 
that we Americans stare, slip in almost unnoticed. 
England is alive with ideas for the future, both re- 
actionary and progressive, but all sprung from 
love of the nation. It is a phenomenon that one 



228 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

does not find in stoical France, nor widely in cheer- 
ful, enthusiastic America, and it is highly signifi- 
cant. The technique and even the completed the- 
ory of possible world salvation, now that the war is 
over, may come from elsewhere, but the drive and 
the practical experiment will be most of all Eng- 
land's. Slow, strong-hearted, deep-thinking island 
that she is — America cannot but impatiently ad- 
mire her. 

One instance will indicate the quality of this 
new energy better perhaps than all the manifold 
activities of the swarming Ministry of Recon- 
struction, more than the elaborate plans already 
authorized for rehousing English agricultural 
laborers, as much perhaps as the open prepara- 
tions that " landed " folk are making for living 
differently in a coming era when wealth will not be 
allowed to waste. On the old sign board at the 
entrance to Christchurch Meadows in Oxford, I 
read last summer in characters of the early nine- 
teenth century, " Admittance refused to persons 
in ragged or very dirty clothing," and remembered 
how Jude the Obscure in Hardy's novel was kept 
out by poverty from those Oxford Colleges where 
the nourishment his mind craved was to be found. 
It was in Balliol (the very college whose Master 
advised Jude to keep to his own laboring sphere) 
that before the war the Workmen's Educational 



WARS ENDING 229 

Association began — that organization now spread 
through Great Britain and spreading through the 
Colonies, in which, as I have already explained, 
worker and student come into contact in informal 
classes to the great advantage of both. And now 
everywhere in Great Britain working-men are 
springing up in the labor parties who understand 
both the needs of common man and those economic 
laws which penalize unrestrained radicalism; and 
everywhere intellectual men made practical by 
association with the workers are joining with them, 
until the W. E. A. has become not a party, but a 
force in all parties, conservative, liberal, radical, 
making for a new order which shall be neither Bol- 
shevik nor exploitative. We could have had this 
fortunate outcome without the war perhaps ; but 
not so readily or so soon. 

As for America, does anyone yet know what has 
happened to America as a result of the war? Of 
one thing only we may be sure, energy has been 
loosed here also, an energy of service and public- 
mindedness such as may well combat and drive 
from our arteries the toxins of self-regarding indi- 
vidualism long gathering there, and the newer 
microbes of violence, lawlessness, conceit, and sus- 
picion which the war has engendered. For three 
reasons — and there may be many more — even a 
pacifist must be glad that we chose the way of war 



230 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

and responsibility in the Spring of 1917. For the 
first, we have moved forward a whole generation 
toward national unity and homogeneity. Next, 
the taste for public service has become common 
and will be gratified, until the price of loyalty from 
the worker becomes an opportunity to serve the 
community as well as the employer or the capital- 
ist. And third, we realize now, even though we 
see the future dimly, that America is irretrievably 
involved in the fate of world civilization, and must 
assume responsibilities in measure with her 
strength. 

Here then are two accounts, ragged and incom- 
plete, but standing one over against the other. The 
debit side is dark, darker it may be than my imper- 
fect generalizations, how dark only the future can 
tell. Europe has been " gassed " by the war, and 
America more than she realizes, that much is cer- 
tain; the symptoms are evident but not the extent 
or the gravity of the harm. Mustard gas, I be- 
lieve, leaves no permanent ill effect behind, though 
for a while it makes the victim a red and prickly 
rack of nerves. Many are suffering from mental 
mustard now. But the deadlier gases have done 
their evil work too : let us face that fact and make 
allowances. 

The virtues sprung from the war, like the mate- 
rial losses of capital and life, are easy to name and 



WAR'S ENDING 231 

define. What is doubtful is not so much their 
abiding value — character, and energy, and that 
new breadth of international vision which for want 
of space I have only mentioned, cannot fail to be 
valuable — but rather their power to bolster up 
this poor old tottering world through the ominous 
days of relaxation that must follow an exhausting 
war. Personally, I do not belong to the doubters. 
I cannot be pessimistic, even in the company of the 
jolly optimist who says, " Germany is beaten, and 
now everything will be just as it was before the 
war." Germany is happily beaten, but nothing 
will be just as it was before the war, not even our 
souls. I have faith that we shall be better men. 

One certain conclusion can be drawn, however; 
indeed, postering on every blank wall could not 
make it more evident. Fine minds have been finely 
touched by the war, and base minds basely. 

By fine I do not mean re-fined, or fine with an 
esthetic or spiritual reference merely. I mean in 
the good colloquial sense of " he is a fine fellow," 
whether a dockman or waiter or clergyman or col- 
lege president is intended. The finest fellow I met 
in 1918 was an American-Italian orderly at the 
front, whose heart was absorbed in the care of a 
reckless young army doctor to whom he was at- 
tached. And I think often of the half wild Cor- 
sican and the wholly wild Apache of Paris who 



232 EDUCATION BY VIOLENCE 

protected my friend, a young French lieutenant, 
one on either side in charge or retreat, and " moth- 
ered " him when he was ill in the trenches. Such 
men as these have been made into raw material for 
reconstruction by the war: finer minds in the in- 
tellectual sense of the word have been roused to a 
pitch of leadership and creative energy not equaled 
since the early Renaissance. And furthermore, 
there are the millions of women who have flung 
themselves into the conflict without incurring the 
passionate reactions of bloodshed, and are trans- 
formed into a power for good we cannot yet 
measure. 

But base minds have become baser, uncertain 
souls less certain still ; and unfortunately it is the 
hearts of gold and not of lead who have gone most 
eagerly to death. France has lost the flower of 
the next generation ; one in five perhaps of the uni- 
versity men of England is dead ; not many in pro- 
portion, but too many of the best boys of America 
have been left on the Western front. And there- 
fore, upon those of us, whether young or old, who 
feel the world is worth remaking and are left for 
the task, a tremendous responsibility descends. 
The dead have died for no lust of conquest or per- 
sonal reward, but to save, as they hoped, their 
country. It is for the living to see to it that the 
world is really saved. No plans of federation or 



WAR'S ENDING 233 

defense, however wise, can secure the future, unless 
those whom this war has made strong can lift to 
safety those whom it has made weak. 



Printed in the United States of America. 



T 



HE following pages contain advertisements of 
Macmillan books by the same author. 



Our House 

By HENRY SEIDEL CANBY 

Cloth, i2mo. 
Mr. Canby, known as a teacher of literature and 
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The Vision For Which We Fought 

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TWO NEW BOOKS ON RUSSIA 



War and Revolution in Russia, 1914-1917 

By General BASEL GOURKO 

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By Baron EUGENE DE SCHELKING 

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" Brilliant Synthesis of the World's Peace Problems " 

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OTHER BOOKS BY HENRY SEIDEL CANBY 



English Composition in Theory and Practice 

By HENRY SEIDEL CANBY and Others 

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By Professors H. S. CANBY, F. E. PIERCE, W. H. DURHAM 

Of Sheffield Scientific School, Yale University 

Cloth, 121110. $1.30. 
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